Positive Theism?

"Everyone else is"
Pascal's wager
Game theoretic structure for co-operative play in social settings
Cognitive escape valve from nihilistic introspection

Why is this whole thing giving me bad flashbacks?

Anyways, if you're going where I think you're going, why not just come out and say it rather than be trollingly socratic?

All right now! We haven't had a good Religious War on Science Blog for months! So, my answer is "Yes".

A lack of truly modern brain cells, or possibly an excess of "The Stupid" brain cells, can lead some to exhibit the Total Tard that is religion in all it's many forms.

Outweard symptons of this Tardicity can range from the fairly benign, "go to church/mosque/synagoge but not really believe it types", to the most virulent forms exhibited by Bin Laden, Pat Robertson and Jery Falwell and their followers.

Thanks for asking.

Be Strong For H-Dog!

Anthropic fine tuning.

But it's not good enough, which is why I am an atheist. Multiverse/cyclic universe models are far more parsimonious than the deity hypothesis.

1. Peer pressure (fit in with family/community).

2. Warm fuzzy feelings of superiority over people who don't share your religion.

3. It encourages you to behave in a moral fashion.

4. Get to go to church every Sunday (substitute for worship ritual and time of worship as necessary).

5. Reinforces various power structures that materially benefit certain groups of people that you consider to be superior to other groups.

6. 'Cause you like stupid things. <-- Note sarcasm.

1. Tools to explore inner self.
2. Ways to connect to others in your community.
3. Ways to connect to people in other communities (mission work, charity).
4. Weekly church is an opportunity to examine one's own morality.
5. A way of finding peace and joy.

ingestion of certain fungi

I think you've got the wrong reduction value in there. Unless by "religious" you mean something other than what I think you mean (theist). What I'm saying is, I can't think of very many reasons for being "religious" that do boil down to "God said so," unless "religious" means "dogmatic," or "observant of a particular denomination's norms."

Where did the universe come from? Can something come from nothing?

Cyclic universes/multiverses just push the question back, as far as I'm concerned. I do worry about 'virtual particles' that appear near black holes (I believe that is 'hawking radiation') - that may be 'something from nothing'.

An interesting post at http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/04/27/how-did-the-universe-start/ talks about some other possiblities (false vacuum kickstarting the universe) but there seems to be quite a few "what-ifs" in that scenario.

I asked my mother once what was the basis for her religion. She replied that someone as good as my grandmother had to go *somewhere* good after she had died.

Her reason was denial of death.

It's comforting to think someone bigger than you is looking out for you (also known to the cynical as fear of growing up), that someone loves you no matter what (and will forgive you if you fuck up—catharsis always has its place), that there's a reason behind everything that happens, even if you aren't privvy to that knowledge.

Conditioning. Inculcate religious dogma into children before they've learned how to think critically and many will be unable to examine those concepts rationally in later life.

By "being religious" do you mean "believe that God exists"? Or do you mean something like "observe certain rituals, try to live up to certain standards, attend religious organization meetings, etc."?

My answer would be quite different depending on which of those is the question. Or am I misunderstanding the question entirely?

I suspect that some would consider "I believe" to boil down to "God said so," but I don't. Is there any reason for thinking Charles Dickens is overrated beyond "I believe"?

I suspect that some would consider "I believe" to boil down to "God said so," but I don't. Is there any reason for thinking Charles Dickens is overrated beyond "I believe"?

Did you like his writing? I'll be the first to avow the fact that I dislike most "serious fiction" in the English literary canon.

Julia: so answer both and provide the distinction.

By "being religious" do you mean "believe that God exists"? Or do you mean something like "observe certain rituals, try to live up to certain standards, attend religious organization meetings, etc."?

The latter is more what I had in mind.
It's not strictly parallel to the earlier question, I realize.

I've been thinking about this today, isn't that spooky? OK, not really.

But what I was thinking about is why some people are interested in spirituality and some aren't. This interest may or may not lead to following an organized religion, and which may or may not include believing in God.

The real reason, in my opinion, that most people are religious is that belief helps relieve general angst and the fear of death. But even when that fear is subued, some people just seem to be wired for religion or spiritual experiences. My mother, for example, claims to have felt empty and "had a hole in my heart" from the time she was three or four years old.

I, also, have always been interested in religion and spirituality. I was a born again Christian for many years, and although I am an atheist today (and I don't believe in the supernatural at all), I am still interested in exploring what I call "spirituality without superstition". I enjoy the process of introspection and self examination that I found in religion and that I now find in other places. I also notice that I can still calm myself and probably lower my blood pressure by reading certain passages from the Bible or singing certain "worship" songs, even though I know beyond doubt that this has nothing to do with a god smiling down on me. I would guess that I am in a huge minority with this combination of traits.

My husband on the other hand, has never really been interested in anything like this. Although he was raised as a Christian, it was never something he took seriously or paid attention to. He thinks religion is completely worthless. And Richard Dawkins can't even have a mystial experience when he's hooked up to medical equipment that's designed to create such an experience.

What makes the difference between these apparent 2 types of people?

P.S. What a cynical and negative bunch you all are.

I've never seen the appeal of Dickens. He seems overwrought. Other people clearly think Dickens is really great. Do they need a reason?

I take it the reference to "God said so" is about being religious because something bad will happen to you if you aren't religious, whether that's actually God or your subculture or family who will do bad things to you. I wonder if there will come a time when instead of internet quizes to tell me who I am, there might be a recycled functional MRI machine at the mall with some protocol that will explore why I really do what I do and believe what I believe. I bet it would tell me that I really did give up on physics because I like to be around women. Maybe I could have stuck it out if it was only that I wasn't that good at experiments.

Reasons for important things aren't simple, of course, not purely positive or purely negative. When my life had me close to contemplating suicide, I quickly backed away from that, knowing I could never do that to my children. Thinking of that was very powerful for me. Yet at the same time I knew that if I didn't have that reason, also within me was the knowledge that I would feel incredibly stupid if I committed suicide and it turned out that such people really do wake up in hell. That's negative, right? Or is it positive in the sense of considering all possibilities in deciding how to live or how to escape life?

Whatever actually constitutes a positive reason, everyone's looking for some power, knowledge, love, and goodness. Is the optimal way of doing that theistic or atheistic? Is that answer different for different people, whether that's biologically different or culturally different? Beats me. I know I get direction, strength, hope and comfort from being liberally religious, and that doesn't involve any fear or some other aspect of "God says so". I would think almost anyone religious gets some of the same, but perhaps for some fear is more important. Maybe fear is more important for me. I did the calculation many time that if atheists are right, I don't mind having led a religious life, no matter how much atheists insult that life. In contrast, if the God of my understanding is real, I'd hate to be an atheist. Maybe fear of missing out is a big reason for me. I know I'm aware of it in the back of my mind, like that fear of suicide being worse than an atheist would think. But there are positive reasons, too.

"I've never seen the appeal of Dickens. He seems overwrought. Other people clearly think Dickens is really great. Do they need a reason?"

Once again, do they like his writing? I think you're trying to epistemologically compare metaphysical apples to aesthetic oranges.

By "being religious" do you mean "believe that God exists"? Or do you mean something like "observe certain rituals, try to live up to certain standards, attend religious organization meetings, etc."?

The latter is more what I had in mind.

I'm involved in a church for the same reason that I attend and work in our local civic club: to enjoy the company of people with whom I share beliefs/values, to discuss and explore with them those beliefs/values and their consequences, and to work with them to try to help people who need it (sometimes each other) and make our community/world a better place.

Julia: so answer both and provide the distinction.

OK. Where those beliefs and values originally came from is a different matter. Though I assume this will bore most, annoy a few, and perhaps provide only another "God said so," I'll explain where:

When I was 14 years old (a long, long time ago), My family lived in a sparsely populated area in a house surrounded by woods. One routine evening after my usual chore of washing the dishes, I walked outside and sat down on the back steps. I looked up and, instead of the myriad of separate trees and bushes and fireflies, etc. that I normally saw, instead I saw - and here it gets difficult to find the words to make myself clear - a single thing.

Every element of the landscape was connected to every other element in a numberless variety of ways. The connections were as real as the elements they connected. And where the connections met, the meeting points were equally real. Some of them were ocuupied by an object, like each blade of grass at my feet, but some were not now occupied. I could see that in some of those points not now occupied there had once been an object and in some of them there would somewhere in the future be an object, while some of them never had and never would be occupied by anything I would be able to perceive. But the possibilities were as real as the present objects. I saw that all this made a whole, a single everything, but I wasn't able to grasp that everything. Each way that I tilted my head, I saw a different angle, and therefore a different selection of points/objects/possibilities and connections, and each selection seemed logical and complete. But another tilt of my head and what had seemed a logical and complete system altered or even disappeared as another system appeared. All I could be sure of about the everything was that it really was everything, including me and what I would now call my consciousness, and that it really was a single whole.

The only emotion I felt was a very mild surprise, and I remember saying out loud, "Oh. So that's how it is."

My mother called me, and I went in to finish my routine evening and go to bed.

I've never experienced such a vision (hallucination?) before or since. At that age, I had never had a drug stronger than aspirin or the ether used to put me to sleep some years earlier to have my tonsils out. I had never drunk anything with alcohol in it. I wasn't in any state of heightened stress or emotion.

Since then, I've never heard or experienced anything that I could honestly say seems to me to contradict that view. For example, the theory of evolution that so many fundamentalists have difficulties with seems to me to fit perfectly with my view of God. I've worked my way through the usual various logical approaches to proving the existence of God, and they all seem flawed to me (though, having an appreciation of practical people, I do rather empathize with Pascal's clever attempt to secure his future). I know of no scientific evidence for God's existence.

But whenever I think I've convinced myself that there is no God, I find that I can't deny that vision of wholeness. I may be wrong, as any human may be, but I would be lying to deny my continuing conviction that that absolute integrity exists, and that everything else is a fragment of it.

Are there reasons for being religious that don't easily reduce to "God said so"?

Sure: being 'religious' pretty much by definition signs you up as a member of a community: and you can make a claim upon the support of that community. This has probably meant the difference between life and death for uncountable numbers of people.*

Even today under Modern American Capitalism, it means that you can pull up roots and move to a new town and immediately find a new community that will help you get settled - point you to jobs, watch your kids, give you a lift to your new job -- all that stuff that 'being part of a community' can help you with.

Near as I can tell, this is the chief advantage of 'religion'.

*Of course, there have been times and places where membership in the 'wrong' religious community can get you KILLED, too.

P.S. What a cynical and negative bunch you all are.

We're not cynical; we're realistic.

Julia,

I really admire your willingness to post your experience in this venue. Probably many here will take it to be a kind of "God said so."

People who've never experienced anything like that, from everything I've read and seen over the years, are incapable of any kind of empathy toward those who have. That's just a fact of life.

My one question would be, is there anything about that vision of wholeness, or your conviction that such an absolute integrity exists, that would point to the objective existence of a supernatural person? This has nothing to do with religious practice or your decision to join a church for the reasons you gave (someone in an earlier post gave similar reasons). Is it a good idea, really, to attach a baggage-laden concept like "God" to what you experienced? It's not what most people mean when they use the word.

Perhaps one answer for the question why be religious is that, even for some of us who have no belief in supernatural persons and no concern about living forever (who would actually want to, when you think about the implications of it?), there seems to be no other way of engaging (for lack of a better word) that wholeness, integrity, and (as it sometimes seems to me) infinite aliveness.

Of course, for people who've never experience such a thing, or who are perfectly happy with handed-down religious doctrines, that's not a concern.

You write beautifully, by the way! :)

If we include observance of ritual, as opposed to belief in stuff, "Works for me" is as good a reason as any. Possibly better than most, in fact.

Michael,

My one question would be, is there anything about that vision of wholeness, or your conviction that such an absolute integrity exists, that would point to the objective existence of a supernatural person?

By "person" I think you may be pointing toward something that is not me and not you, but exists, like us, as a subsection of all there is. No, I have no reason at all to think there is such a person with supernatural powers. But as God, according to what I saw, includes all persons, God is not 'not a person,' I think, but rather more than a person, who includes all the powers (if that's a good word to use) that there are.

But that doesn't mean that I saw God as impersonal. While I can no more really conceive of what God is than my cat can conceive of what I am, I do feel the connection between me and God (or, for that matter, between my cat and God) is as personal as it gets. As a very weak analogy, if my liver could think, I suppose it would feel that its connection with me is pretty personal; certainly I feel that way about it. And if a structure as limited and small as my brain can have consciousness, maybe a structure that includes everything (even my brain) would include consciousness, too, or something much larger and more complex.

As for the living forever bit, in that experience when I was 14, though I had no idea at all what it could mean, it seemed absolutely clear to me what was no longer present in physical form continued to be real, as its place that web of relationships continued to exist. An everything that once included me will, as I saw it, continue to include me as a part of that infinite connectedness. That may or may not be the same as living forever. Another weak analogy: I remember finding my son (now in his mid-thirties)heartbroken and crying after his kindergarten graduation. When I asked what was wrong, he gasped out that he couldn't ever go back to Mrs. Singletery's class again. I assured him that we would visit her new class, and see her again. He replied angrily, "That isn't the same! I can't ever go back!" And of course then I had no comfort for him. He saw clearly that he couldn't go back, and at the same time he had no vision of what was ahead. I think coming to die must be a little like that. So people try to imagine the future in terms of the present, and think of golden streets.

For me, all our talk of religion is metaphor. I see no reason to believe that our brains with their recently evolved ability to speak are likely to be able to understand much or say much about God. I keep the term because I think that as flawed and riddled with superstition as organized religions are, some/many/most/all(?) religious people are at bottom trying to find some way to conceptualize and talk about that integrity we perceive. I want to be part of the conversation. And I think a great many people actually do mean by "God" something very like what I mean. Unfortunately, a concept so difficult to express is easy to brush off as meaningless, while the fundamentalist view with all its superstition and irrelevancies comes to be a sort of icon for religion.

If it helps make me any clearer, I will say that I do pray. Why? Well, why not. I talk to my car (please, please start), to my feet (don't give up now - we have only ten minutes more exercising to do today), and to my cat (why did you do that). Talking is one the main ways that humans recognize and explore our relationships. I think there's no reason I shouldn't use talking in exploring my relationship with God, too.

I believe that God exists. How to explain that or what that means I have no idea, but things are as they are, whether anybody can understand or explain them or not. Thanks for your polite inquiries. Actually, I didn't expect anyone to be interested.

(1) I met my wife at church.

(2) When I communicate with another person, I get the sense that emotionally and cognitively there is "more" there than a set of complex algorithms. This is not something that I can give you a testable hypothesis about -- there are computers that can do a good job on the Turing test nowadays, for example -- and if it were, it would be science and not religion. I know many consider this childish and facile, and I fully recognize that this may just be the result of incomplete understanding (science may one day completely describe human consciousness).

(3) Perhaps religion is to science as statistical mechanics is to fundamental particle physics. Well, not really, because statistical mechanics is science and is a developed theory that is testable and all that. But this connects to my previous point.

-Rob

If it helps make me any clearer, I will say that I do pray. Why? Well, why not.

Interestingly, although I'm scienceblogs.com's token God-boy, I don't really pray, at least explicitly.

Occasionally, very occasionally, I'll do the kind of Tevye-prayer that's like you talking to your car. As for real deep prayer, however, other than the big group ritual things in church, I don't do it.

I figure God knows what I'm thinking and feeling without my needing to say it.

Part of the point of prayer is for us to understand what we're thinking and feeling, but one can do that via meditation or reflection without explicitly praying.

Most religious people would not share my opinion on this.

-Rob

If your at the top of a religion you get to manipulate other people, must be a great power trip.

If your at the top of a religion you get to manipulate other people, must be a great power trip.

Ask Stalin : you can do the same thing at the top of an explicitly atheistic power hierarchy as well.

It's not the religion, it's the power hierarchy. They show up all over the place.

-Rob

Part of the point of prayer is for us to understand what we're thinking and feeling, but one can do that via meditation or reflection without explicitly praying.

Most religious people would not share my opinion on this.

I do.

Some of us live more in language than others do. I think primarily in words, and use words to know what I'm thinking and feeling. When I'm working out political stances for my city work, I do it in the form of an internal (and sometimes out loud) conversation. You may not require that.

Why, even Romans 8:26 seems to acknowledge that at least some people of that period realized we can connect with God without explicit prayers.

There are many other Christians who think as you do. Nevertheless, I hope you won't be concerned much about whether or not you have the agreement of most or some or any other religious people (or the atheists who tried on your blog recently to say you aren't really a Christian because you don't think what they want to believe all Christians think). It's surely at least as much your place/duty/right to figure out your own relationship with God as to figure out your own relationship with the people you know; that is to say, completely yours.

During the latter half of my Christian phase, it was a sort of extended metaphor by which to organize my experience and inner life. Besides which, I liked singing in the choir ;-). Theology was a kind of poetry (unlike in fundamentalism, where it's more like math or physics).

Since I wasn't trying to convince anyone else to adopt my personal metaphor, I saw no reason to give any justification beyond "Because I damn well feel like it!"

Julia,

Thanks for your responses.

I agree that "all our talk of religion is metaphor." Still, I myself could never get involved with any religion centered on the Abrahamic Jealous God.

Luckily that (metaphorical) deity represents only one streak in the rainbow, so to speak, so there are plenty of other colors to choose from! :)

>If your at the top of a religion you get to manipulate other people, must be a great
>power trip

I've known a lot of sincere religious people in the pews, but I've never met one preacher who was not corrupted by the power to some degree.

Still, I myself could never get involved with any religion centered on the Abrahamic Jealous God.

You're pretty safe from being actually involved with an Abrahamic Jealous God, as there isn't any such separate narrow thing, just people who envision God in such ways. So by all means don't get involved with such people if you don't want to.

The Old Testament is clearly bits and pieces of the story of a half-civilized group of people struggling to grasp something about a God whose existence they recognized through occasional flashes of insights. Certainly, they failed more often than they succeeded, seeing God as sort of ultimate tribal leader. And at least some of the Jews were pretty disappointed when Jesus came along and pointed out that God isn't a political leader. I find those OT stories interesting and full of warnings for me to monitor my own natural desire to see God as the great giver of favors.

But I hope you don't let other people's anthropomorphic tendencies (including any of mine) limit you to the either-or choice of either involving yourself with one of the off-the-rack concepts of God as represented by the various vocal organized religions/new-age-groups, or else dismissing the concept of God entirely. You might one day find it interesting to spend a little time with other people (there are lots of them) who are at least trying to explore a non-anthropomorphic vision of God as the everything, the ground of all being, the sum of all things and physical laws and structures and interconnections(all metaphors, of course, but metaphors for something I am convinced is objectively real).

We know that a thing that is the total of parts plus their interrelationships (including physical laws) have qualities that none of the individual parts have - an organ is more than a bunch of cells, a person is more than a collection of organs, an engine is more than a bagful of parts - and it can be at least an interesting way to pass a few hours trying to envision what the qualities are of that which is the total of everything, including the possibilities that have no physical realization.

But the world is as it is whether we notice it or not and regardless of how much or how little of it we understand. In my particular vision of the world, there is a real and permanent you, located in a place of absolute value in the structure of the whole and thus in intimate relationship to God. Nice to have met you.