Greetings!
This post is a little long but I think we're coming to a head here. I think we're at the crux of the argument after this.
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 16th, 2023, 9:19 amA story from Berthold Brecht, an influential 20th-century German dramatist and poet:
“Someone asked Mr. K. if there was a God. Mr. K. said: "I advise you to think about whether your behaviour would change depending on the answer to this question. If it didn't change, then we can drop the question. If it did change, then at least I can tell you that much help me to tell you, you've already made up your mind: you need a God."”
I agree that this quote is true for the vast majority of people. There are a number of philosophical reasons why most people need to believe and there are social reasons as well. We know of the stereotypical disingenuous preachers and apologists who use pseudo-science and pseudo-philosophy to promote their agendas. But It's astonishing to witness the atheists who accuse believers of being anti-science while also being so dogmatic in their non-belief that they will defend it at the cost of sacrificing their integrity or reason, just like their theist counterparts.
Nevertheless my situation is a little different: I solidly identify as a very moderate epistemological skeptic. What that means is that I will consider the evidence and weigh it, and only take a positive position when I can prove a proposition to be true or false with good evidence. If a matter is unknowable,then no matter what my best uneducated guess may be, I actively leave it out in my own mind and don't take a position on it. If and when new evidence becomes available, I update my knowledge, and change my position if epistemically warranted.
What matters the most is to live a meaningful and happy life. I don't believe that answers to the toughest metaphysical questions are absolutely required to find the deepest meaningfulness and happiness in life, but we definitely need a sound set of epistemology, ontology and ethics which tracks well with reality. If there's an afterlife whose outcome depends on this life, we have to factor that in with great urgency and diligence. If there isn't or it's unprovable, then we also have to factor that in and put way more weight, importance and effort into this life, because this life then becomes our "eternity." And since it's not so eternal, we better get onto that asap.
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 16th, 2023, 9:19 amWhat do you mean by “exist”? This is a very important question to ask, because many traditions see God as the underlying reality out of which everything comes. A cosmic consciousness which dreams up matter and also life, figuratively the “breath of life” of all creatures, the conscious essence of each of us. The Atman that is one with Brahman.
What I refer to by "exist" is the existence of a God who exerts his will upon human beings such as answering prayers or deciding a person's fate as to a great or horrible afterlife based on a set of parameters, such as virtue and sin.
If a God does not exert his will upon human beings because he's incapable of doing so or does not ever care about exerting his will on humans no matter what, then it doesn't really matter all that much to know whether or not he exists because by this definition, he has no influence whatsoever in our lives or afterlives.
Sure, it would be neat to know if a God exists even if he doesn't affect us, but what I mean is I wouldn't suddenly become Zoroastrian because of the existence of an impotent God.
Yes indeed, the concept of Brahman is indeed fabulous. After a gruelling cycle of 100M lives of suffering on earth, we attain Moksha and what is the reward we get for all this work? We get to acquire the ultimate truth of the universe. What's so great about the truth that it's the ultimate reward? Well, in principle, if we knew the ultimate truth of the universe, we would only hold the truest of beliefs and no false or contradicting belief, and all of our thoughts and actions would be in harmony with nature. That would mean we would avoid all unnecessary suffering and lead lives that maximize meaningfulness and happiness. Our truest nature (our soul), Atman, is also synonymous with Brahman. That means we are at the purest and best when we act in accordance with truth and the reality of the universe. This is in a manner representing why having a sound epistemology and striving to hold true beliefs is so important.
A life which is lived to its fullest is a life where you set out to take on the whole weight of the world on your shoulders, sacrifice yourself in body, mind and soul, and you do it because it's the right thing to do and for no other reason or for no gain: that's the story of Jesus Christ.
Karma is a pretty good principle to live by: generally when you're nice to someone, they tend to be nice back, all things being equal. It also entails that you shouldn't judge people harshly.
All these symbolisms and philosophical underpinnings are fantastic representations of the human condition. However, once again, Atman and Brahman are not proven as supernatural concepts. That's what we're trying to prove here.
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 16th, 2023, 9:19 amAlan Watts said with tongue in cheek, "You're it!" and was essentially pointing to the idea that you are not just an isolated individual separate from the universe; rather, you are an integral part of the entire cosmos engaged in a playful game of hide and seek with itself. He would explain that the universe hides from itself by taking on various forms, identities, and experiences, and our individual lives are part of this grand cosmic dance. He aimed to challenge the conventional notion of the self as something separate and distinct from everything else.
This is called non-duality, and by recognizing that you are not a separate entity but rather a manifestation of the universe itself, you may come to understand that the game of hide and seek is a way for the universe to explore and experience itself in all its diverse forms. This realization can lead to a profound shift in perspective, fostering a sense of connection, wonder, and humility. This concept is deeply rooted in Eastern philosophies like Advaita Vedanta, Taoism, and to some degree Buddhism which emphasize the interconnected and interdependent nature of all phenomena.
Yes. that's the teaching of Eastern theology and what Moksha/Nirvana is. I'll even go as far as to say that you can reach what is described as "enlightenment", that is reaching a state of being where you experience your oneness with the whole universe. The incredible efficacy and veracity of meditation is proven by the burning monk in Vietnam and the likes, who are able to have complete effective control over their mind, emotions and bodies. I've been a daily meditator for many years and while I never reached a sense of unity with the whole universe (enlightenment), I have personally experienced states of being (Samadhi) that feel like my consciousness is expanding and that I've become hyper-aware. These "transcendental" states of being are truly experienced and perceived by meditators subjectively and meditation practice can bestow remarkable and infinitely useful abilities to a meditator. I'll also grant that it just makes sense that we are more one with the universe than we are separate individuals.
But these are all natural processes that can be measured and demonstrated by science and logical argument.
However, it just does not follow that "therefore God" or "therefore reincarnation" etc. These need to be proven separately as they are completely separate phenomena that are supernatural.
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 16th, 2023, 9:19 am Morality is the behaviour and beliefs that a society deems acceptable, and most morals aren’t fixed. They usually shift and change over time. If morality were given by God, he’d be changing his mind all the time (compare OT with NT), and if he exerts his will upon human beings, how will we learn, since mistakes are the biggest source of moral learning.
As an aside, I agree with that morality in its details is relative to culture and time. However, you could use broad strokes about moral principles that exist universally among humans and perhaps even extract objective morality simply from objective truths about the human condition (but that's for another day). For example, due self-sacrifice to benefit the in-group (whichever group that may be) is seen as highly morally virtuous. Another one is that today, it's accepted universally that it's highly immoral to punch an old lady and steal her things no matter where you live in the world.
How will we learn? This is the problem. If God is omnipotent, then he could've created us in such a way that we didn't need to learn, and especially that we didn't need to learn by suffering! Here I wanna be clear that I'm not making a claim whether it's good or not to learn in real life or that there's opportunity in failure and suffering: it is and there is. But ehat I'm arguing is that God makes all the laws of physics and all the rules of nature and everything in between. He could choose to create us in a manner where suffering is impossible. But he didn't for some reason. He makes absolutely all the rules. And there's absolutely no limit to what property he can give or not give to anyone or anything in the universe. Why didn't God create us with the capacity to suffer? Either he's not omnipotent, he's not omnibenevolent or he doesn't exist.
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 14th, 2023, 8:13 am Most people address the problem of evil from the wrong perspective when they are arguing against Christianity. They base their assumptions on God being some kind of infallible judge, rather than the ground of all being, discovering through us the variations of being. In that way, as I said, evil is a moral judgement to contradict a common sense of what is good. That is why non-sentient beings or things cannot be evil. One idea that is around in many traditions is that when our physical existence is over, we come to see things as they really are, which either commend or condemn our behaviour. Karma, purgatory, all these ideas come from that thought.
Sure, but now you're creating a problem by mixing philosophies. I agree that a system of karma and reincarnations fixes the problem of evil. However, this is not the idea of the Bible or Quran. There is definitely heaven and hell in the Bible and the Quran. And barely any room for purgatory. God is not along for the ride like Brahma in Hinduism, he's represented as the ultimate authority with ultimate power and ultimate knowledge multiple times:
Matthew 19:26 "But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible."
36-Surah Ya-seen 82 "His command is only when He intends a thing that He says to it, ‘ Be,’ and it is."
25-Surah Al-Furqan 6 "It has been revealed by He who knows every secret within the heavens and the earth. Indeed, He is ever Forgiving and Merciful."
Job 42:1-2 "Then Job answered the Lord, and said, I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee."
There are marked differences between these theologies. The Abrahamic God is a judge, I'm sure I don't have to quote this. If he's all-powerful and all-knowing, it's inconsistent with his nature of perfect goodness to ascribe properties of evil and suffering to anyone. Either the omnipotence or the omnibenevolence of God has to go for suffering to make logical sense.
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 14th, 2023, 8:13 amI stay with what I said:
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 14th, 2023, 8:13 am Evil is commonly associated with actions that cause significant harm, suffering, or destruction to individuals, societies, or the natural world. These actions are typically seen as morally wrong and morally blameworthy, which also makes sense in the context of being aware. This suggests evil is intentional infliction of harm or suffering and distinguishes it from accidental or unintentional harm. Evil actions are typically purposeful and involve a conscious decision to engage in harmful behaviour.
You state that all evil events have to be intentional. So let's go from here: the most important value is morality when it comes to how God judges people and how people judge people. If you commit a crime considered particularly evil, you go to jail forever or you get executed. If you're seen as exceptionally morally-virtuous, people often start revering you (Mother Theresa, MLB, Sai Baba, Gandhi etc.). Do you agree?
If there is a box that's designed specifically so you put all evil events and deeds that ever happened in there, then by definition all the objectively worst possible things are in the evil box. Anything that's outside of that evil box is objectively better. If something is morally-neutral, like a glass of water on a table, that's outside of the evil box and therefore it's ALWAYS better than something that's inside the evil box, such as someone intentionally punching an innocent person. So it's your duty, to the extent that you can, to always prioritize preventing an evil event from happening over a morally-neutral event.
If I put on a mask, rob an old, homeless lady on the street of the only $100 she has and run so that no one will ever know it was me, this act is evil because it has the component of intention.
While I'm intentionally robbing the old lady, unrelated to my crime, a bomb is deployed by sheer mistake and it annihilates half of Europe. This is morally-neutral because no one intended the accident.
If you get a time machine and you can only stop one of the two events, then it is your moral duty to stop the evil event because the evil event is truly, objectively bad while the morally-neutral accident is an objectively better event because it is not evil.
That's the problem we run into when intent is a necessary component for evil.
Consider law, which is how we enforce morality in society: if you kill someone by negligence or omission, you're still going to jail for a long time. But if you do it with intent, then you do more jail time. So even though killing with intent is morally worse, killing by negligence is still considered morally really bad.
But again, some events are so devastating that intent has no relevance at all. If nuclear warfare erases all humanity from existence, it's of no matter at all as to whether someone started it intentionally or not. It's all over, the ultimate evil happened with no chance of redemption, no one is there to care about the fact that it was an accident.
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 14th, 2023, 8:13 am If … two letters but a big word. Why would God not want us to figure things out? I mean, no amount of telling my son that the hotplate hurts teach him better that him feeling it. Not that I would inflict 3rd degree burns on him, but human beings are usually sensitive enough to retract their hands quickly. As a boy, I learned much better from experience than from theory, and only later did I get the idea of reading up first and then comparing it to experience. Alan Watts once said, “An ardent Jehovah's Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.”
I absolutely agree with your values. However, this is not sustainable in the world of a perfect God. Your son will have to learn that hot plates burn through experience and my daughter will have to learn that it's a bad idea to climb on the kitchen table because she doesn't know how to climb back down. However, we're not Omnipotent Gods, we don't choose the properties to give our children. If I could, I'd give my daughter omniscience.
There are two levels to our conversation. There's one which is the earth-realm where yes I'm amazed by everything I see: I can't believe music works the way it works or how math works so deeply on our minds. I count my blessings every day, I'm so grateful to be alive in good, bad or ugly times. I anticipate seeing my wife everyday, my daughter, my mom, my sister, my friends. All this is good stuff.
Then there's the other level, where things are just inefficient, unfair and much of the time outright horrible IF we consider the existence of a tri-omni God. Right now, there's a child in a secluded village in Africa, hidden from our cameras and back-lit screens, who is suffering atrociously from horrible disease and will soon die from lack of drinking water and starvation at 6 years old. And there are millions of them every year. The child certainly didn't have any choice in the matter. This is pointless suffering.
If it's an amoral, unguided process like natural selection causing these tragedies, then that's what that is. But it's just logically-untenable to accept that a good God would allow this.
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 14th, 2023, 8:13 amThat is indeed how most fundamentalist sects try to inflict their “flock” with obedience, by making them all think alike. Then you get tragedies like Jim Jones and his church committing mass suicide, or occurrences like in 1992, when Glenn Summerford, a serpent-handling preacher, was convicted of attempted murder of his wife with a rattlesnake, by forcing her to be bitten on two occasions, at their home. Ralph Hood, a psychologist of religion, observed, "If you go to any serpent-handling church, you'll see people with atrophied hands, and missing fingers. All the serpent-handling families have suffered such things." In other cases, people are pressured to donate large amounts of money, all argued from scripture. Other former Christians talked about feeling encouraged to cut ties with friends and family or being told demon possession was the cause of mental health issues or their sexuality. Several were shown graphic images of dead bodies, they said, as a warning of what happens to those who leave the church. It is mind-control.
I agree with you there. Literal interpretation isn't tenable and incredibly evil. I made the point that using good reason when interpreting the Bible as to what is poem and what is literal, is not only necessary, it appears to be the only way to derive any value from the Bible.
However, neither literal nor allegorical interpretation prove God or the supernatural claims.
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 14th, 2023, 8:13 amI disagree, intention is what makes an action evil. There may be colloquial uses of the word that suggest that unintended harm is evil, but I disagree.
It's like I discussed above. You're technically right when it comes to religious morality, but for all practical intents and purposes, things conducive to human suffering is what everyone considers evil (like cancer, drug addiction, radioactive contamination or famine) and human well-being is what everyone considers good (virtuous action, good health, clean environment, art, beauty etc.). Any religious moral rule which is not linked to piety is about promoting human well-being and discouraging human suffering. Intent makes an ugly deed extra evil but glaring negligence is not too far off from blatant intent.
Note that these are moral intuitions. Obviously you know intuitively that it's much worse event for half a continent to be destroyed than for one person to get robbed. So that's what I mean. The whole point of morality is geared towards better human life: whatever is conducive to well-being is considered good and whatever represents ill-health, pain and death is bad. This concept is deeply-ingrained in us.
But we can agree to disagree about this for now, it's not the biggest deal . My bigger problem is the existence of suffering itself.
But I'm seeing that you have a different view of a God that is not tri-omni. So then let me get to the bottom and we'll talk about the implications.
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 14th, 2023, 8:13 amThere are some things that are predictable, especially if we are attentive. This doesn’t make everything determined. Iain McGilchrist makes this point:
Christopher Hallpike makes the point that convergent patterns of social evolution do not imply determinism. ‘It is rather like the game of Monopoly’, he writes:
the players are all different and the throws of the dice produce a completely different game each time, yet the underlying constraints produce essentially the same result – a single player who owns everything and has driven all the others into bankruptcy. This is a good illustration that unique events, even randomness, and free will, are quite compatible with broadly predictable outcomes.
I absolutely agree with this. I argue that people do not have a priori freewill and that's independent of God's existence. But I don't mean that we don't have agency as in a higher-level process of the mind. What I mean is we
effectively don't have freewill because everything we come across was a result of cause and effect. Everything that makes us we don't choose: we don't choose our genetic makeup, we don't choose our environment, we don't choose which era we live in, we don't choose the people around us as children, we don't choose our sexual orientation, we don't choose what knowledge will cross our paths. And all these traits define who we are to an extraordinary degree, some 90% of our life and identity or more is pre-determined by all these factors we have zero control over. Even if we make a choice due to a random factor like a quantum fluctuation, we didn't choose for the randomness to occur. It's like you're rolling the dice but you don't get to choose what number shows up. You also don't get to choose whether or not you're good at monopoly because that would depend on whether your environment provided you prior access and knowledge about the game and whether your genetics allowed you to formulate a sound strategy and understand the strong areas of the board.
Now that doesn't mean a human has no agency whatsoever. There's a difference between a person and a rock, obviously. The more appropriate knowledge you have, the more control you have. But luck plays such a bigger role in defining who we become. At least up to a point where we learn what we can do to exercise control over our own lives to the maximum possible extent. But even that knowledge first must cross our paths by luck. We have a responsibility to exercise whatever will we may have to improve ourselves and the world and our choices definitely matter.
However, we don't a priori freewill. And that's fine. It doesn't mean we're automaton robots either, or as Richard Dawkins put it "DNA-propagating machines." We're NOT that.
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 14th, 2023, 8:13 amWe don’t know the plan of God – if there is one – we can only interpret patterns we see, images we gain from telescopes or microscopes, and deduce from that. People writing scriptures did the same and those that proved truest to life were retained as trustworthy, as it were prophecies, but we have made it very mysterious.
Well yeah, but that's my point, not yours
That's exactly my position: We don't know if there's a God, we cannot know. If he exists, we don't know if he has a plan for us or cares at all. Scriptures are great insofar as they reveal deep ontological truths about the human condition that are otherwise nearly impossible to intellectualize. We keep inventing and looking through our gadgets to answer the question of whether or not God exists but the more we know, the more we realize we're not getting any answer just yet.
And that's fine if that's the case that we can't know. I don't have a problem with this life being the only one.
But if it's the case that God exists, to know what he expects from us would be the single most important piece of information of our whole life.
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 14th, 2023, 8:13 am The word sin is a translation of a word that means to miss the mark, like with an arrow and a target. It has developed over the years to mean separation from God, and we have Genesis marking the original sin, but if you consider that the misdemeanour was to become aware, the story starts to become a little satirical. This is especially true when the solution is, to become even more aware. The eviction from the garden is like growing out of childhood, and there is no way back to the condition of childhood, but there is a way to adopt what Buddhist call “Beginner’s mind,” which enables us to see without all the baggage of adulthood. When you hear Jesus speak in the Sermon of the Mount, you get a feeling of how he saw this condition to be, especially when he describes the good people as saying, “when did we do these good things?”
I agree with this interpretation. I still use Genesis to point to absurdity from time to time but in reality, this is also my interpretation. It's describing the acquisition of knowledge and foresight (we see into the future by reasoning and planning) and the coming of age, and it provides a warning about the fallibility of humans and that your father cannot protect you from snakes forever.
I still believe that it was also an attempt to explain the creation of the universe, earth, the sun, humans and animals. It's not the worst explanation conceivable when you have nothing to work with. It's functional for the environment and the era.
However, attributing a sin committed by a distant ancestor to all of humanity is dreadful stuff, whoever decided to guilt-trip a whole people and many generations must've been quite the Machiavellian. What my father has done during his lifetime has nothing to do with me, let alone what my ancestor from the year 10,000 BCE did.
Stoppelmann wrote: ↑August 14th, 2023, 8:13 amThe problem we have is that we can only talk about the attributes or properties of God within a certain framework. I would choose a different framework to you and consequently we misunderstand each other. Within the framework of Advaita Vedanta for example, Brahman is often described as the unchanging, eternal, and all-encompassing reality from which the universe arises. It is considered the underlying principle or substratum that pervades all existence. This interpretation is rooted in the Upanishads, which are ancient Indian philosophical texts that form the foundation of Advaita Vedanta. The Upanishads contain a rich tapestry of metaphysical, cosmological, and spiritual insights, but they are distinct from mythological narratives like the Bible, instead such narratives are found in texts like the Puranas or the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata.
Right. But what are we discussing? The Hindu Gods and philosophy? Or the Abrahamic/Christian God? Because these are very different Gods with different propositions. There's some crossover in some of the philosophical wisdom they convey, but they're completely different theologies with different premises. It's good that they're different because they teach different truths.
There's no problem of evil with Eastern theology. The premises and metaphysical propositions fix that problem.
The problem of evil is a big problem for Abrahamic religions.
And all in all, to start believing in any religion, there are a priori premises that need to be accepted as fact, that cannot be proven empirically or by logical argument (unless you can demonstrate to me that I'm wrong).
When I refer to different theologies, in particular Abrahamic vs. Hinduism/Buddhism, I'm thinking of completely different Gods and metaphysical propositions. They're very different.
I don't find it rational to pick different traits of Gods from completely different theologies to fix various objections to God's existence.
So please tell me what are you exactly referring to when you say God, in a tangible manner. And how do you prove his existence? What is your metaphysical proposition? Reincarnation or heaven and hell?
summarises well, I think. Philosophically, I think it is the case that almost nothing we believe can be *proven*. Science has never *proven* anything, as any good scientist will happily explain if asked. So much of the time, it's either guesswork — hopefully (but not always) *educated* guesswork — or nothing.