What Kills Gods?

Nietzsche declared God dead, and I think it is safe to say that for the most part his declaration was premature but maybe not altogether wrong. Without reference to specific statistics (although you can look to the Pew Forum for confirmation if you're so inclined), it seems safe to say that if God is not dead, he's at least downsizing considerably.

There is an impulse that I often see that attributes the death of God to enlightenment. The story goes that man needed God because man was ignorant and needed explanations for his world, so he wrote God in all of the gaps. The gaps got smaller. There was less room to be occupied by God. So we killed him. Knowledge killed superstition.

This is not altogether wrong, but it misunderstands the complexity of human beings. It supposes that humanity were just sitting around trying to understand things, but in fact humanity has a whole life to live with concerns that have nothing to do with explanations.

In fact I imagine that if we were so inclined we could sit down and map out rough estimates of a number of different impulses that make God-talk appealing. And as each of those impulses is satisfied by some innovation other than God we will be able to watch the ranks of religious drop further and further. Because what kills gods is people ceasing to need them and then redirecting their energies and resources elsewhere.

However, we will also come to a group of impulses that is only satisfied by religious talk, and in these areas no amount of innovation over time will ever replace the need for religion.

Impulses like the need to relate to essential mystery. The need to transcend spacetime. And the need for a sense of cosmic justice. These are needs that will never be satisfied by any increase in knowledge, technology, or prosperity.

So knowing what it is that kills gods also shows that God will never quite die.

From the Point of View of 60-90 Years on a Spinning Rock

Suppose that there is indeed a creator God and suppose that there is no life outside of planet Earth, just an enormous universe that is indifferent to man and arouses indifference in man. For what reason would a creator God create such a universe?

Consider also the lifespan of a human being. Compared with the timeline of the universe a human being who manages to see his one hundredth year still does not rise to even a hair's width on that timeline. Even the timeline of human history makes any individual life seem hopelessly short. Supposing a creator God, why would the world be set up in this way?

Pausing to note that this question can not be answered in any satisfying way, I remind you that the question is asked to shed insight on a facet of life, not to actually try to discern the artistic sensibilities of an incomprehensible deity. That would require a blog post at least twice this length.

I take this arrangement of the universe and this arrangement of lifespans as creating a situation wherein one can not sensibly live while trying to view the world sub specie aeterni. We cannot make sense of our lives by looking at the universe - by trying to see the one fact. Our lives are hopelessly insignificant looked at from that vantage point, we would not be able to rise from our beds in the morning if we felt and valued as people who grasped the universe. Instead the only way to live is to every day see the world from our point of view: from the perspective of a chunk of rock spinning around a star and only about 60-90 years of that point of view to boot. Any other point of view makes life unlivable.

Does this mean that I think that objectively our lives are insignificant? My god, objectivity is not an option! But, no, I do not say that objectively our lives are either significant or insignificant. The significance arises when the world is seen from a certain perspective. If you adopt certain perspectives, the entire human condition becomes a sickly mistake; adopt other perspectives and there is nothing more important than a human life. That is, objectively human life is absurd given certain contexts, and objectively human life is epic given other contexts.

And if there is a God, I think that this arrangement of the universe was a method by which he choked off certain kinds of perspectives.

The Substantial Problem of Pain

The Problem of Pain has never been an intellectual obstacle to theism for me. There has never really been a time that I can recall that I simply could not reconcile the concept of God to the concept of pain in the same worldview. Naturally there are many who would disagree with this. It seems to me, though, that while there is an intellectual Problem of Pain/Problem of Evil, it exists primarily as something for budding theistic thinkers to cut their teeth on and a persistent question for different intellectual methods and different schools of thought to be measured by. On the other hand when it comes to factors that determine whether or not a person will be a theist, there is a more substantial Problem of Pain, one that is not as easily wiped away by reasoning, language, and argument.

Whatever we say, whatever we hold true, if we mean it, we live with it. We live - and feel - according to whatever we honestly believe. Now, it is a comfort and a joy to imagine that God is on our side in life and wants us to feel well. If our lives are pleasant, it is a joy to believe that God made our lives pleasant. If our lives have little struggles and problems, it is a joy to believe that God is actively educating us and that he will never allow us to be tempted beyond what we are able (1 Cor. 10:13). On the other hand, if someone experiences a depth of despair, where their will and the world are completely at odds with one another, what joy does God bring?

Suppose we say that God works all things for the good of those who love him (Rom. 8:28). What does this mean? Perhaps we take it to mean that God will eventually turn that despair into something beneficial. This can bring joy to a person, but, I think that this idea is not robust. That is, the idea seems to be there to bring joy and does not seem adequate for the phenomena it is supposed to have grown out of. This is because God is said to be all-powerful and is said to have created the world, and even if we allow for devils and free wills, it is hard to escape that God created the conditions necessary for the despair to emerge in the first place.

So God works all things for the good of those who love him? But did God not create the despair in the first place? The seemingly gratuitous, seemingly pointless pain and misery? Isn't that the logical consequence of the idea of God?

Of course we can avoid this conclusion several times over. We can say that it is not God's fault, it is free will. We can say that it's not God's fault, it's the devils. These are not robust, it is rare that our minds naturally lend themselves to these explanations, one must stretch and condition oneself to give these answers. Then we have more novel explanations: perhaps God is on our side but he is not all-powerful? Well, in that case some of us would naturally be inclined to worship him, but for most of us I think we would view God the way we might view Superman if he lived in the real world: helpful, powerful, but nothing transcendental.

Keeping God as God, and seeking a robust idea, most of us will come to the conclusion that God is the author of our pain. That the single most fundamental force - capable of moving the universe itself as well as any of its contents - decided to make you suffer. And you're told that good will come of it, but good from what point of view? After all, if human suffering is the means, human flourishing might not be the end. Is it good from your point of view, or good from some transcendental point of view that you have to climb up to? And how could you live a life with that notion? How can you live and try to escape your despair while also believing that God approves of your despair?

This is the substantial problem of pain. In such a situation, it is oftentimes easier to remove God from the worldview.

Breed of Cowardice? Sensible Position?

Regarding my previous post.

Is this a breed of cowardice? It certainly could be called that. For indeed you could say that I am afraid of living in a blind and chaotic world and consequently I cast the world as an act of God to impose the appearance of order, intention, and art on the cold, indifferent universe.

On the other hand, is it a sensible position? I too believe it could certainly be called that. After all, it is no less an imposition to call the universe cold and indifferent. If we can impose that image, why can we not impose this image? It does no good to say do away with all image, without image we could not even use the word "universe" let alone "universe as act of God" or "universe as cold and indifferent."

You can tell me that this image, this interpretation, this worldview, this construct, smacks of weakness and cowardice. I will not say that you are wrong. I will however say that it is more than weakness and cowardice, and that there is more to be considered than the degree to which a soul is willing to force itself to breathe thin air.

Life is not Art

When I read The Duty of Genius, I came away feeling as though a real saint had lived in the not-too-distance past. I'm getting mushy and sentimental, but the world seemed better for having had a man like Wittgenstein as an example of the kinds of heights and depths a man could reach. His commitment to improve those around him likewise arouses in me a desire to improve those around me in some way.

In what way is this desire mine?

Why did I not have this desire prior to reading the book? Or if I did have it, why was it so anemic until I read the book (this is not to say that it is not still anemic, only to say that reading the book strengthened something)? How can I say that this is my desire when it was aroused by my environment?

But then, my environment could not produce the desire without me as a factor. So it is not as though I could say that it is the environment's desire and then consign myself to oblivion. I am there. I am a part of this.

However, when I read the book I did not read it for the purpose of arousing this desire. I read it wanting it to work some good on myself, but I did not know what good it would be. Like going to a surgeon and saying, "I've heard good things about you, why don't you knock me out and do what seems right to you!" Yes, I took a step in the process, and yes both the book and surgeon have to work with the material I provide them with, but it is not I that built myself into anything. I simply arranged the interaction.

When I see the world this way, I am more of a theist. Because I do not deny that I am there, but I do deny that I am sufficient for life. I can not view my life as a work of art; there is too much that belongs to the world for me to claim myself as any kind of ordered and intentional work. I hold out hope for a kind of determinism that would allow me to call the world God and would allow me to call life a wrestling with God.

I am a Theist

I stood in my kitchen watching ground beef sizzle in a green pan. The leftover homemade salsa I dumped into the skillet was the only flavoring; I didn't feel like pouring salt on it. My mind began to wander: I imagined someone asking me if I believed in God. I ran over my answer: I am an epistemological agnostic, which places me in the without-theism camp, but I love God and I am willing (or at any rate, willing to will) to let his will prevail over my life and to try to always make the decision to ultimately love my existence no matter how hateful it is on every level short of the ultimate.

Something did not feel right in this, though. There was something different in my character, which resulted in a feeling of dissonance when I gave my answer. Initially I thought that maybe it was certain recent refinements in my thinking and philosophy that produced the dissonance. I sat down and re-read my blog Why I am an Atheist, and found that there was really nothing in that blog that I once agreed with and now no longer did. That blog still describes my stance.

So what is the problem?

I think the problem lies in this: if you ask me if I am a theist, I would ask you "in what sense? According to what game? What schema? What Layer?" But if you refused to clarify and give me context and simply repeated the question (or if I was in a real world situation where asking "in what sense" tends to make people roll their eyes at you), what answer would I give? What would be my default answer to the question if it lacked context?

That is what has changed. In the past my default answer would have been either "atheist" or "agnostic" because I saw the question first in terms of assent to propositions. Now, if you ask if I am a theist, my first response is not to approach the question as a question about my beliefs, but instead as a question about my attitudes and values. In those respects I am a theist through and through.

Therefore, I am a theist. And if you provide me with the adequate context, I will explain to you that I am an atheist. And if you change that context, I will explain to you that I am a theist. 

An Evangelical World

Currently I have been reading In the Land of Believers by Gina Welch, a book that I deem fully worth every cent of the dollar I paid for it at the Dollar Tree. The book details the adventure of an atheist woman who joins Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church and goes undercover as a Christian to immerse herself in Evangelical culture in hopes of understanding the culture and consequently writing a book about said culture that would help bridge the divide between Evangelical America and secular America. Hitherto I see no evidence to suggest that this book will bridge any divides apart from the divides in Welch's own character (divides that seem to have been created by the experiment rather than preceding it), but the book is certainly interesting and promising to the strange breed of atheist like myself.

However, the book did stir one thing in me that I am not sure if it intended to stir, and that I find I need to be reminded of on occasion: that I would not do well in an Evangelical world, that I do not want to see or live in an Evangelical world.

Knowing that skepticism and doubt are integral to my worldview, that I find value in the emotional shades of happiness, despair, pain, and pleasure rather than believing that a sunny disposition rooted in the confidence that in all things God works for those who love him should be maintained and sought at all times, and that I just plain can not imagine seeing the world in that monolithic way that identifies goodness with Godliness and sees all goodness as being derived from the extent to which God's will is fulfilled, assures me that I just could not breathe that air. This last point, goodness being identical with godliness, may have been one of the things that most drove my heart away from Christianity even while my mind retained loyalties; to me it made the world so tiny, although I am certain that there are many who would insist, citing personal experience, that it makes the world more vast.

To be sure, I imagine that most in the Evangelical world are not eager to breathe my air either. I chalk it up to a difference of natures and a difference of what experiences one finds livable. All the same, though faith and religion are of the utmost importance to me (strange breed of atheist that I am), I don't ever want to interact with that faith wrapped in the body of Evangelical Christianity.

The Best of Christianity and the Bible

Just as a general impression, it seems to me that the things most lovable about Christian thought are things that one has difficulty finding in the Bible. I could point to C. S. Lewis as a possible embodiment of this: his ideas make the world a very exciting place while also providing us a fear and a comfort in God. But when you read Lewis you have to wonder what his ideas are rooted in. Surely scripture is a part of it, as well as Anglican tradition, but, again as a general impression, it seems as though most of Lewis's thought is based upon what keeps Lewis comfortable and engaged.

But, then, it is just convention and tradition that elevates the Bible so high that we regard it as the only appropriate foundation for Christian thought.

How can we regard the Christian thinker, then? I suppose we must regard him as any other thinker. His work is an amalgamation of what he finds beautiful, what he finds useful, what he finds necessary to support the former, what appeals to his biases, what draws him out of himself, what he was educated into, what he must rebel against, what makes him feel strong, what makes him feel safe, in short, what he can live according to.

But what then is Christian thought? Orthodoxy can only exist in a relative sense. Define "good thought" and then you can compare your definition to whatever someone offers for consideration. But then, they can merely reject your definition. Sound doctrine, orthodox thinking, this is merely the attempt to align one's thoughts with an arbitrarily grasped form of truth.

Which is probably why the best Christian thought seems to depart so far from what we could reasonably derive from the verses that inspire the thought - because the scripture is a trigger, but the individual and the totality of his life provides the content.

As an atheist, I say that this shows the unreliability of all religious orthodoxy. As one who is and probably always shall be interested in becoming a theist, I say that this, coupled with a kind of determinism, is the nature of revelation.

Atheism and Nihilism

Atheism does not imply nihilism. Nihilism does not imply atheism. The two are distinct, but there is a popular perception that the two are tethered together. Why does this perception arise?

The first reason would be the historical one, which is that in Christendom morality was rooted in theism, so a rejection of God implies a rejection of morality. This is less interesting, since I wonder why the perception arises still today. You can say that it is a holdover from the past, or you can say that the perception only arises among those who still root their morality in their theism, but I think there is an epistemological reason.

We do not need a God for true, objective morality to exist. Perhaps it is just there. Perhaps moral imperatives are just natural facts. Yet, if we reject God on the basis that it does not satisfy the intellect to believe on such scant evidence, would we not also have to reject any kind of external morality for the same reason? It is the standpoint of doubt that causes trepidation: if your doubt causes you to reject this picture of reality, what else is missing from your picture?

Religion, Even if True, May Not Be so Important

One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

-C. S. Lewis

Meh....

-Comment Sections Everywhere

Suppose we were to be contacted by angels tomorrow. Spiritual beings would manifest themselves in physical form, call a press conference, and reveal the mysteries of the universe. They would tell us that religious claims (or at least some religious claims) were correct. There is a God. And they would consent to all manner of rigorous scientific examination to show that their bodies were composed of matter that could not be accounted for by the known universe, and then they would toss out some mind-blowing version of the Ontological Argument that made God's existence indisputable.

What would the world look like?

Over a year ago, I argued that it may be necessary for God - if there is a God - to obscure himself in order to keep the mundane realities of everyday life looking necessary for human beings. I still, for the most part, agree with what I wrote there: if God appeared in all his glory he would shatter our ability to be concerned about our own lives. However, if God himself did not appear, but his presence became a fact on par with any scientific hypothesis that we regularly rely upon, what would the world look like?

And my answer would be, not very different.

After the initial shock of having God's existence proven, we would have to realign our thinking a bit. The atheism movement would fragment between those who would become theists and those who would redefine atheism on moral grounds. The perceived enmity between science and religion would fade. But then, what?

Our lives are busy, our situations diverse, and our mental power limited. Most people will spend most of their time not particularly worried about God; they may give God a portion of their time and energy but they will also give a portion to family, work, sex, entertainment, sports, finances, maintenance, and personal hygiene. Even those we might consider intellectuals or reflective people will have to devote their mental energies to economics, chemistry, political science, cultural criticism, and the proper implementation of web standards. Indeed, even if God were a fact, he would be a fact that a great many people find useless given their own, limited projects. God will hardly capture everyone's heart simply because he has claimed territory in everyone's mind.

Human nature is diverse. Even if we remove the question of God's existence, not all human beings will react to God's existence the same way. Frankly, a lot of people don't spend a lot of time worried about God or spiritual matters at all. God occupies a place in nearly every person's mind, we all have moments where theistic questions seem significant to us, but for many of us these moments are fleeting. We have an entire life to live, only some of us are so inclined to grow obsessed over this one aspect of life.

Tainted Faith contra Pure Faith

If there is a Pure Faith, what is its character?

First, what is a Tainted Faith? I want to say that Tainted Faith is effable. Tainted Faith is pagan, that is, comprehensible and worldly. We can make sense of a Tainted Faith, we can paint a picture of the world according to the Tainted Faith. The Tainted Faith is the ineffable collapsed into a sick science.

So then, what is the Pure Faith? The Pure Faith is that thing that is corrupted when made comprehensible. It must be incomprehensible. It must be where reason does one no good. We can not form a picture of the Pure Faith, we cannot imagine what it looks like. It is not clear, logically formed propositions. It may even appear to be nonsense, if we do not distinguish between what is beneath reason and what is above it.

But then, if it is incomprehensible, what does it have to do with us? And how could we possibly interact with it? I propose placing the Pure Faith into a Religious Body. But then, is that not tainting it?

No, because if we understand the nature of what we have done, we know that the religion is not true. That the religion acts as a mechanism by which we practice the Faith.

But if it is incomprehensible, why do we bother? I can not answer that. In fact, I would say that if you have to ask, then it is not for you. You would be happier without it, I bet. Not, mind you, that we are doing this to be happy.

The Rotten Body that Faith Resides in

Suppose that there is a God. And suppose that there is a faith that brings us into communion with Him. And suppose that this faith needs the trappings of a religion to be made intelligible.

If there existed a religion that originated in a hoax, was spread by means of deception and violence, and only among the adherents was honesty possible because all the teachers knew the falsehood of what they taught (at least initially until the first teachers died and the religion took on a life of its own), would this be a suitable religion by which we could approach God?

Or perhaps we should ask if it is possible to find a religion that was not similarly rotten?

A Pure Faith

Would it be possible to come to a "pure" faith apart from all the particulars, cultural trappings, and situatedness of the religions that actually exist in the world? Is there some purity behind all the peculiarities and specifics of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and so on? And if it is possible, how do we reach such a faith?

Or does the soul of faith require the body of a religion? And if so, are the bodies perfectly interchangeable?

Could we create new bodies as we like to house the soul? Or are there criteria that must be taken into account for making suitable bodies?

Why I am an Atheist

Whenever I write about religion, I write sympathetically. Every so often I even post thoughts that I fancy might lend credence to the existence of a God. My philosophy writings tend to revolve around different ways of seeing the limitations of reason like a man desperate to widen gaps so he can stick a god in one of them. I even have an admitted Religion Addiction. So why is it that I identify as an atheist rather than a theist?

When I initially began identifying as an agnostic (for the purposes of this post, I am not really going to delve into the distinctions between atheism and agnosticism. I am going to just conflate the two positions) it was for the simple fact that I realized that there was no good reason to believe in God. What do I mean by no good reason? I mean that whatever you said about God was just as likely to be wrong as it was to be true. Whether you said God is love, God is hate, God is an elephant, or God is not there, it all amounts to talking about something that is unreachably distant from us. One claim was as good as another until we could get in there and start doing some investigating.

So, at the time, I came to the conclusion that mental health required that I only believe in propositions that rise to a certain level of evidence, and those things that were asserted without evidence I intended to dismiss without evidence. For the first time I could see many of my philosophical problems melting away, as did western civilization when it began taking doubt as a starting point. By instituting a certain threshold of evidence, I was able to get rid of many ideas that clashed with each other, and my thinking was able to proceed along smoother ground.

My views have changed over time, but not in a repentant way. I have tried to proceed forward with doubt: you could say I have doubted so much that now I am turning doubt on itself. Presently I have been writing about things like epistemic lenses and the rules of reason, which are basically investigations into why our thinking does not really work like a tool trying to reach the absolute of truth, but rather the particulars of different situations. Using the idea of epistemic lenses or particular epistemologies, I should be able to create a particular epistemology for myself that would leave room for religious faith, so why have I not?

The reason is the one I gave back in February. When I contemplated making a leap of faith like that, I could palpably feel the dissonance it produced in my life. The mind believes in certain ways, and even though we can have the mind believe according to the particular rules of a particular epistemology, we cannot have the mind believe in a way other than the mind believes. This is as plain as saying you cannot punch someone except by punching them.

And the mind believes in a roughly experiential way. I can not conceive of any other way for the mind to believe. Without data from the world, we do not believe, our beliefs lack content. Once you accept that God, if there is one, would be transcendent to the world, it becomes mind-blowing to believe in Him because it means believing in something that you know you can not even comprehend. Like saying, “I do not know what this sentence means, but I believe in it!” It tries to believe in the absurd through the strength of will. For me, at least, this produced a dissonance that I could not live with.

This is not blasphemous, if one supposes that God is pleased with the minds he created. But why would I be concerned about blasphemy while being an atheist? Would it seem too wishy washy to say that once you step outside of the question of God's existence, I am a full theist? Suppose I say, “I love God. I place my life in His hands. I trust in Him to do with me what he will, and I aim to love him no matter how thoroughly bad my life gets. I just do not believe that He exists.” Is there any way of twisting this so that it is not just blatant self-contradiction?

If I were to try to explain it, I would say that the proposition “God exists” does not ring true according to any of my rules of reasoning, for the simple fact that I say existence is a property of the world and God is said to be outside the world. So I do not believe in Him. He is utter absurdity, a priori absurdity perhaps! Now, if there is a God, I would expect him to be utter absurdity. If there is a creator, I expect that I should not be able to believe in Him. And if there is not a creator, I expect that I should not be able to believe in Him either. If he is not there then he is too far beneath my thinking to believe in, and if he is there then he is too far above it! I suppose that it is the attempts to fit God into the order of existence that causes religion to start sounding so absurd: you're trying to pour a solid block of ice into a glass that can only hold water. When you break the block into cubes to fit it in the glass, there's a lot of ice missing, and what made it in is just going to melt.

As for why I love God, this is because it seems like the only reasonable thing to do given my position. This is a half-truth, it is reasonable, but it is also a result of my will. You can say amor fati or you can say love God. I do not say that “God” is a metaphor for “fate.” I am saying that I can see that my life is not in my own hands, and I am making the willful decision to love rather than hate. The world is indifferent to my attitude on the matter, it is only my own experience that is affected by it. But why introduce God into it when fate would suffice? This is one part hope and one part personal benefit. You do not love laws of physics, mathematics, psychology, and biology that lead you to become a broken alcoholic laying on the side of the road or a prestigious millionaire with fame, accolades, and respect. But you can love God for setting the forces in motion, or you can curse him. And I do not say that God gave us the good and Satan introduced the bad: it's all God, but the categories “good” and “bad” belong to us. This is not a statement about God, though, it does not require God to exist to make sense. This is a statement about my attitude, and it holds whether God is above or not.

I am an atheist, because it is what my reason demands. This is the field of epistemology. But I love God, because it is what both my reason and my will demands. This is psychology and cosmology. I have hopes pertaining to theism, but all of my hopes hinge on a fundamental change in my nature. That is, God could not reveal himself to me, but rather God would have to elevate my mind so that it became transcendent and therefore capable of grasping transcendent truths.

Religion Addiction

I made a simple promise to myself three years ago when I realized that I no longer had any religious faith left. I told myself I was an atheist now, with whatever that entailed, but I would not become one of those atheists who spend their lives hung up on religion. Religion, if false, was of no consequence as far as I was concerned. So, upon making peace with my atheism, I decided to close the door on religion.

As my past blogs have shown, this has been a spectacular failure. I simply can not do it. Religion is too interesting to me. Even if it is all nonsense, I have to say that it is the highest form of human nonsense and the kind of nonsense most worth poking, prodding, examining, and testing for anything redeemable. For a time I was able to put religion away and for a few months I had indeed reached the point where it just seemed like an immature state of mind that I had to grow out of. That only lasted a few months, though, before I was back to questions of what is beyond the universe.

To me the question is perfectly pointless. If there is something outside the universe, it would be beyond human comprehension. It would be like trying to get Pac Man to understand three-dimensional motion, artistic desire, and literature. You cannot fit these concepts into “waka waka waka.” Just so, if there is a God, we have to just accept the fact that he is in control, or not in control, or drunk at the wheel. The point being, God will do what God will do and we can not really change that. So the question is pointless to me.

And yet I keep asking the questions. Why? Well, I have one hopeless answer and one hopeful one. The hopeless answer is that I just have a religion addiction. I am addicted to questions pertaining to the concept of the supernatural, the concept that this world is not all that there is. That is not to say ghosts and demons (although those are interesting to me in their own ways), what it is to say is that I am obsessed with the possibility that even if you were to write a book containing all the facts and science in the world, that there would be still more content that was hidden from you and that maybe one day you are going to have a collision with all of that hidden reality.

My more hopeful answer is that I can not really contemplate the unknowable anyway, but I can contemplate the limits of our knowledge. I tend to take a dim view of the limits of our possible knowledge: I exclude religion, ethics, and aesthetics, and in some ways I say that none of our knowledge actually hangs on the world, but actually just hangs onto unknowable axioms thereby making all knowledge hypothetical. So by maintaining my religion addiction, I also provide myself with emotional fuel for an investigation that may actually prove valuable.

If I am to be perfectly honest, I do have another hope. Part of me thinks it is appropriate that my middle name is “Thomas.”

I have noticed over the time I have spent on the religious areas of the internet that I am not alone. I have seen atheists and theists (usually atheists and doubting theists) in various areas say that sometimes they find the whole religion question pointless, but they can not stop asking it. I remember one person asking if some people, regardless of which side of the debate they find themselves on, are just naturally always going to be drawn to religious questions.

I say yes, and I say you will not win in a fight against your own nature. So, hold out some hope that it will do some good, and keep asking the questions you want answers to.

A Belief Unlike Other Beliefs

Those who do believe in God do so in one of two ways: either they believe in a way that is different from the rest of their beliefs, or they believe in a way that is the same as the rest of their beliefs. The latter are in error. They simply are, I cannot conceive of any way that they are not mistaken short of God having personally revealed himself to them. Because we believe in the things that we believe in because we have encountered them or because they have been recorded by people who have encountered them (history and science) and these records can be scrutinized and relative degrees of reliability can be discovered. God, on the other hand, is not known in either of these ways. If someone believes in God in this way, he does himself a disservice: he has not experienced what it is really like to be religious. He just happens to believe in an additional science.

For those who believe in a way that is different from the rest of their beliefs, well, now all we have is linguistic similarity. Because if this belief is different from all other things called beliefs, we can always choose to call it something else, so as to make it plain how distinct this kind of belief is.

God, Pain, and Why Christianity Struggles to Accept Evolution

There exists a popular misconception about Christianity and evolution, namely, that Christianity refuses to accept evolution because it runs contrary to the account of humanity's origin in Genesis. "Misconception" is probably the wrong word because for many Christians that is precisely why they do not accept the theory of evolution, but preserving a literal reading of Genesis is not that critical to many Christians who would still have a hard time meshing the theory of evolution with their Christian faith. It seems to be that the reason evolution is so offensive to the Christian is that it implies one of two unacceptable concepts: either the world is not broken, or God created a broken world.

Evolution does not work without death. If there is no way of removing traits that do not aid in reproduction and surviving until capable of reproduction, then evolution will not occur. It implies brutality. Christianity, however, teaches that God made a perfect world without death and teaches that death occurs only because the perfect order was broken when Adam sinned. If brutality existed prior to humanity - and therefore prior to sin - there are only two explanations. Either the world is not broken and death is just a part of the universe that God created; or the world is broken, death is an abomination, but God created a broken and abominable universe.

In the Christian narrative, God is blameless. It's all humanity's fault. Of course, the potter hath power over the clay, but still, Christianity makes humanity the cause of the pain in our existence, not God. Evolution states that death and brutality is the world's natural state. Consequently, the battle over a literal interpretation of Genesis is just a surface conflict for the Christian, even if it is conceded that Genesis does not need to be literally true there is still the deeper issue of the universe being essentially deadly while death is thought to be the wage of sin.

What would it take for Christianity as a whole to be reconciled to evolution? I suppose they would need to do away with the notion that the world is broken or shattered or in some way deficient from its proper design. To do away with this notion is to do away with the Christian narrative, though, it makes Christ's death superfluous. Is it possible to believe that the world is as God intended it to be and also believe that there was a need for Christ crucified? I do not know. From my vantage point, it seems that Christianity presupposes a diseased world. Besides all this, though, there is the fact that if the world is not broken and the world contains suffering and death, then that means God is the one who added suffering and death to the universe, which implies that God has a dark side to him that most of us would not want to contemplate while seeking comfort on a Sunday.

There does exist the alternative possibility that the world is broken, but that God intentionally made a broken world while intending to heal it later. This certainly makes more sense for someone who thinks that an unintentionally broken world implies incompetence on God's part, but it retains the implication that suffering and death exists because of God, not because of sin. Again, this causes friction when Christians try to think of God as the enemy of their pain.

So, can Christianity ever be reconciled to evolution? I think so. But to have a worldview that robustly embraces both the Christian faith and the theory of evolution would mean radically rethinking the relationship between God, death, and human suffering. It would have to accept pain as being an instrument and creation of God rather than an affront to Him.

An Argument From Particularity

About three hours ago I was finishing up my closing shift, which at that moment involved me running a broom over the floor of the store, when I had a tiny thought pop up that seemed to clarify another largely unspoken impression that I had been carrying for some time. Initially I figured I would write down a brief outline of the idea, and then file it away in my list of trains of thought to follow when I had more time and clarity of though. But, now as I am preparing to go to bed, I find that I don't really feel like reading tonight, and instead I want to see if this idea goes anywhere.

I call this idea the Argument from Particularity. Off the bat let me make it clear this is an imperfect argument, in the sense that one of its premises is unable to be proven or disproven, and consequently the entire argument belongs to that realm of things that could be true but must be disregarded because its truth is equally likely as its falsehood. For that reason, I submit this as a kind of imaginative philosophy - philosophical fiction you could call it - that may bring fleeting comfort, irritation, intrigue, or interest if it is successful. My argument runs as follows:

It has been said that this world appears very much the way we should expect the world to be if there were no God.

However, the world operates according to very particular rules. First according to what we call the rules of logic, which we typically hold to apply absolutely. Secondly to those particular laws which we discover through empirical observation - what we call scientific law.

Given our ability to create artificial worlds - whether using the age-old method of literature or the new method that involves computer technology - we see that creating involves the creation of new rules. In a book, for example, we can imagine a plot being woven wherein it becomes a rule that all immoral people must suffer or a plot wherein all selfish and creative people emerge successful in their endeavors. Such rules do not exist in our world, but our stories are created by implementing more rules than those that exist in real life.

Or, as a better illustration, imagine a man sitting down at a brand new computer, intending to play a game on it. The computer, however, has no video game for him to play. In that moment, there is nothing but possibility, hindered only by the rules that govern the player's own world (the game can't involve anything that would involve violating the law of non-contradiction, for example). The player, because no game has yet been made, could end up playing a mystery game, a simulator, a first-person shooter, an RPG, or even some sort of innovative game that has not yet been attempted. The protagonist, since he has no appearance, could have any appearance. The villain likewise. The game mechanics are hindered only by the limitations of the hardware and the rules of the real world. But, once the player creates a game for himself, or once he downloads a game to play, all these possibilities disappear. Particularity sets in, the protagonist looks like this, the game is played like this, the environment looks like this. The transition from possibility to actuality is accomplished through limits and rules.

Because our own world operates only because so many rules have been implemented (such as it being impossible for a spot in the visual field to be both blue and green at the same time in the same way; or, like the speed of light being 299,792,458 meters per second) it is unlikely that our world is the ultimate reality. Given the way that artificial worlds are brought about by an increase in rules, it follows that the ultimate reality would either be ruleless or have some bare minimum number of rules.

Consequently, it is likely that our universe is artificial, as it certainly contains so many particular rules that certainly exceed any bare minimum number of rules.

Problems With this Argument

The last part of the argument, the conclusion, contains the unverifiable claim that our universe contains so many rules that we certainly exceed any bare minimum number of rules. After all, we do not know what the bare minimum number of rules might look like. It might look remarkably like our own world.

However, at the very least, it seems that it should at least be possible for a world to exist without the limitations of space and time. And for that reason, at least, it should be possible for a more ruleless world to exist, one that could be responsible for the creation of the space and time limitations of our own world.

The truly critical problem with the argument is that we do not know for sure if it is always the case that creation is the act of laying down limitations. We know that this is the case in our world - literature is always the acceptance of one possible plot as opposed to all others, photography is always the choice of one angle and one set of settings and one subject and background as opposed to any others - but it does not necessarily mean that this would apply outside of our world. Nor does it necessarily mean that everything with a limit is necessarily created. All created things are limited, but not all limited things are necessarily created.

The Value of the Argument

If there is a value in the argument, and I imagine it would need a lot of polish first, it is that it articulates that feeling one gets that the world is very arbitrary and particular and very much like a work of art. It seems that were we without a director, the world would be much more chaotic. Instead, whatever chaos there is that exists, exists within a strict web of order and structure. This structure, however, seems arbitrary. And we do not expect chance to obey arbitrary laws, only essential immutable laws. It causes one to imagine a lawgiver, an artist, a God who articulated the structure of the world.

The argument, I do not believe, actually makes the existence of God one bit more likely. But maybe it puts into words a feeling that one sometimes gets. And if so, then I say that it is valuable.

You Have to Give Up

Notice the Fingers Remain Separate

Over the course of a few weeks, I found myself wanting to officially leave behind the atheist label and re-enter the theist camp. I had been wondering about questions of epistemology and, without denying that evidence for the existence of God was sorely lacking, found that I wanted to place faith in him all the same and began to think that it would not be unjustified if I did. I cannot deny that there were a lot of emotional and non-rational reasons I found myself wanting to return to God, but I refused to actually return until I had settled the issue of what a rational faith in God would actually entail.

It all stemmed from a realization I had: given that determinism is true, every event in your life could be considered ordained by God so long as he arranged the particles of the universe at at least one moment in time. From there, I speculated as to what is meant by a “soul.” If we accept determinism then we also accept that the human body is no less a part of the motion of particles in the universe, and that while we have a will we do not have a will that transcends the workings of the Great Machine, which meant that any idea that life was a test or that we were going to judged according to our success or failure in any particular area had to be abandoned since all of our successes and failures could ultimately be traced back to an act of God. What then is the self, I wondered, and I came to the conclusion that the self, if it was anything, was something that could be called “I” that was tied to the motions of my body but that, nonetheless, transcended the universe.

From here I had a view of the cosmos I found that I could believe in: the universe as a work of art and as a refinery, that every tragedy and every triumph was ordained by God through natural processes for the means of creating a diversity of souls. Souls which would otherwise be perfectly equal and homogeneous, could be given diversity by in some way causing their nature to be determined by the natures of the meat machines on earth. Since they would transcend time, their nature would be determined by the entirety of the machine's life, not any one particular instance, and there would be no reason to suppose that eternity operated according to its own timeline as though we had to wait for the body to die for the soul to be released. Life, then, was all about experiences. Experiences that defined us and, somehow, our eternal souls.

The fact that the world had numerous competing views of God would no longer be an issue, since I simply said that all ideas of the ineffable were, by nature, wrong. Nonetheless, I did not need to get rid of religion altogether, I could say that religions sprang up because they were deterministically ordained by God to spring up as they served his purpose of refining our natures.

God is transcendent. Our souls are transcendent. So the lack of scientific evidence is irrelevant for them. It would be impossible to have any kind of sensible evidence, or even any kind of sensible notion of these things. Since they transcend our universe, they transcend our thoughts. Whether they're nonexistent or super-existent, the universe would look the same to us. And from this basis, with God and selves safely beyond anything we could possibly understand, the concept of 'faith' finally began to make sense. Faith is trusting in something incomprehensible, unknowable, and non-rational. It was not a contradiction of reason, it was a moving-beyond, it was traveling into territory where our reason would not do us any good.

With this conception, it would be impossible for me to ever gain ground in a debate with a skeptic, since by my own account God was not existent. But at least I had something I thought I could believe in. Besides, if I came to such a belief and someone else did not, by my account, both of us came to our respective beliefs through the arrangement of particles ordained by God. I no longer needed others to believe as I did for me to be reassured about the fate of their souls.

Everything was falling into place. But I waited. I wanted to examine matters from all the angles. I wanted, if necessary, to be able to write a book explaining my transition. I refused to take the decision lightly. [EDIT: although you may not be able to tell by this blog. Reading through it the next day, much of it seems sloppy. I wrote early this morning before sleeping]

And what I found was that such an idea produced a change in my everyday life. In the course of a day I was in constant anxiety over facts. That is, I was in anxiety about the the fact that I was putting my weight on a step that I had no reason to believe was there. This took the form of anxiety over my nature as a human being (am I a transcendent soul? Or am I just a meat computer?) most of the time, other times it would be the fact that I was starting to define myself in relation to something that I knew I had no reason to believe was there; but neither of these corresponding ideas had to be present, at almost all moments of the day I had a palpable sense of wrongness, anxiety, and insecurity even without a thought accompanying the feeling. The worse part of it all, though, was that every everyday occurrence was accompanied by a feeling that there was something not to be trusted in it, that there was some devastating fact lurking in the shadows that would invalidate everyday life.

It was the little things: talking to my girlfriend on the phone, cleaning up a back room, doing a little exercise. I couldn't shake the feeling that all of these things would be somehow invalidated, and I do not even know what I mean exactly by “invalidated,” except that I would somehow see that my typical responses to these occasions would seem inappropriate if I just discovered some new fact that lurked out there somewhere.

It all reached a head one night as I lay in my bed. I realized that I had made knowledge, certainty, facts, and reason into enemies. This would not stand, I lived in a world composed exclusively of facts, I could not survive making them my enemy. As I lay there thinking, I realized that I had overlooked the obvious.

God was outside the universe, outside existence, whether that meant he was transcendent or nonexistent. That meant that from my point of view, he wasn't there. And, if my idea about souls was true, then it did not matter a single iota if I believed in them. All my ideas were aiming at some idea of epistemic justification, but I did not even really believe in epistemic justice to begin with, due to my ethical nihilism. God had given me no real reason to believe in him, and presumably that either meant that he did not exist or that he did not particularly want me to believe in him.

And from there the world started to make just a little more sense again. I could act in everyday life without feeling as though I were participating in something low and broken. I am not even certain I can put it in sensible language, it was all stomach acid and nerves that I was interacting with. So, to resort to cliché, I had to give up a heavenly mind to experience any earthly good.

For what it is worth, there is nothing about this that contradicts, at least, Christian thought. 1 John 2: 15-17 makes that clear to me, anyway.

It seems to me that, given the situation that we are in, we have to give up. We just have to give up. Give up on God, give up on objective ethics, give up on souls. That is not to say that all of these things are not actually in some way out there, simply that we are not in a position to know anything about them. And while there may be other possible explanations, if we only consider the possibility of us being the creation of a transcendent being or the possibility of the universe containing everything necessary for its present state, then in both cases we may as well just go about our lives since either God has not seen fit to show himself to us or there is nothing for us to be shown.

And with that, I think it's time to step away from religious thought for awhile. Not forever, but for now. I remain, for the time, an atheist. I end my thought on the subject with this thought for now: where we previously might have lived in faith, now we can live in hope. You can hope there's a God. You can hope there's a heaven. You can hope that there are souls. That has not been taken from you, these hopes are still available. You can choose to turn the hope into faith, if you like, but if you're anything like me you won't function well looking at the world that way. For those people with characters similar to mine, we must just live in hope. Once you do that, you can set some of those unanswerable questions aside for awhile, and focus instead on the little mundane questions that must be answered daily, the little stupidities that make life worth living.

And if there is a God, trust Him to manage His own will.

The Universe, Existence, and the Ineffable

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The universe is the sum total of all existence. If something exists then it is, by definition, a part of the universe. Consequently everything that does not exist is not a part of the universe, and everything that is not a part of the universe does not exist.

God is said to be the creator of the universe. Creators always precede their creations. God, therefore, was not in the universe by virtue of having created it. Consequently, God did not exist.

Further, although Christians may point to the person Jesus Christ as a example of God being in the universe, it is generally held among theists that God transcends the universe. If God transcends the universe, then God does not exist.

Presumably, if you believe in God, you suppose that I've tried to play a trick on you through my use of definitions. I remember a similar argument being presented to me back in my theist days, and I rejected it because I saw no reason to accept the given definition of “exist.” What, then, does the word “exist” mean? To exist is to be. I am means I exist. X is means X exists.

Language developed so that we can express thoughts. We wanted to express what was in our heads (or perhaps you say that what is in our heads is already in its own kind of language, it does not matter for this particular matter). What, though, was in our heads to express? We were surrounded by natural phenomena. We were surrounded by the universe. Our brains were reflecting, sometimes darkly, the natural world around us. When we said that something existed, we meant that we could encounter it in the world. Later on, with the rise of theology and the idea of God's transcendence, we began using the word “exist” to mean that it is but that it is not in the world.

This, I say, was an error on our part, a confusion of language. What the word was meant to express was simply being a part of the universe. By expanding the definition to include things outside of the universe, we made the word incomprehensible. What is communicated when we say that God exists? We mean to say that He is, however, we do not say that he is to be found in the world. He does not exist in the same sense that, say, rocks or people exist. When we say a rock exists, we mean to say that it can be found in the world. We might imagine that when we say “God exists” we are speaking as in an analogy, maybe we mean that God exists in His world as a rock exists in our world. That, though, presupposes that God's world is like our world, with space and time, and who really presupposes that when confronted with the idea laid out plainly?

Earlier I wrote, “We mean to say that He is, however, we do not say that he is to be found in the world.” The word “is” is just another word that means “exists,” though. By trying to say that “God exists, but is not in the world” we have made a confusion of language. Existence reduces to the state of in-the-world-ness. It would be like saying ice is cold, but does not have a low temperature.

You still suppose, I imagine, that I'm just playing semantic games. Let me then ask, what does it mean to not exist? When we say, for example, that leprechauns do not exist, we are saying that you can search the whole world and not find a single leprechaun. All leprechauns are things that are not in the world. This is not all, though. There is an unspoken connotation with this sentence. That connotation is what I want to draw out.

Let us suppose a theist says, like I have said, that the universe is the totality of existence and that God precedes it and therefore is not a part of existence. The theist has essentially said that God does not exist. Now let us suppose than an atheist says that same series of words. He too says that God does not exist. There is a difference here, though. And it is this difference that has me writing at 2:13 in the morning.

The theist, in my example, presumably does not say that God precedes existence ironically. The atheist only says that God precedes existence in an ironic way; he does not think that God precedes existence, he only says it to take what the theist believes to advance his argument. The theist sincerely believes it, though, he does not take God's nonexistence to harm his faith.

I would like to pause for a moment to clear up a possible misconception. My hypothetical theist here is not one of those who wishes to rescue Christianity from belief or something like that. He really places his faith in God. He simply agrees that existence refers to the universe and that God cannot, therefore, exist. One possible objection to my hypothetical theist is that all theists, by definition, believe that God exists. In that case, I am using the term “theist” in a technical sense to refer to people who place their faith in God rather than people who believe that God would fall in the existence circle of a Venn diagram.

Now, with my hypothetical theist and atheist saying the same words, I say that there is a difference in their meanings, a difference which makes all the difference in the world. The atheist, in saying that God does not exist, says that God is lower than existence. God is beneath the universe. The totality of the universe's facts transcend God the way they transcend unicorns or vampires. The theist, on the other hand, is saying that God transcends the universe. God is not a part of the universe because God sits higher.

This can be a confusing matter. Let me make it clear that the difference in these two meanings is not a value judgment. I do not mean that the atheist reviles God and the theist worships God. That is not what I mean by higher and lower. What I mean is that when people say that Superman does not exist, they mean that you cannot find him in reality, reality is too real for Superman, Superman has a kind of inferiority. On the other hand, when a theist says that God transcends the universe, they mean that the universe is in some way inferior. When the theist and the atheist argue about God's existence, what they are really arguing is whether God is superior or inferior to existence. Or, more properly, they are arguing whether the universe is superior or inferior to God.

It has been said that the term “supernatural” is an oxymoron. Nature encompasses everything, so to go beyond that is impossible. Nature is also a word used to refer to our universe and all of its natural workings. This second definition is what is meant in the word “supernatural.” Of course, many would say that the second definition is also in use in the phrase “nature encompasses everything,” but that's not the point of this yet. If we have a concept of the supernatural, I think that we also have an often unmentioned concept of the subnatural, which is where we would place married bachelors, wolpertingers, and the Lorax.

The crisis of those of us who live in the universe (in other words, all of us), is that we cannot really comment on the supernatural or the subnatural in any meaningful way. All we can say is that something is non-natural, or, not part of the universe. Whether that means that it transcends our reality or is transcended by our reality cannot be determined by us. God and the minotaur are both outside of the universe, that is all we know. We cannot even know that our universe is transcended by anything, it may be that our universe is on top and anything not found within it is properly subnatural.

I call all of that outside of our universe the Ineffable. I started this with that last statement in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” All we can talk about is our universe, our world. That is what our minds evolved in, that is the origin of the thoughts we want to express in words. God is not in the universe, so whether sub- or supernatural (which is actually a statement about the universe), He is ineffable.