Category Archives: Pantheism

A little while ago the prolific and intellectually-promiscuous Tyler Cowen solicited the strongest arguments for the existence of God, and then with some prodding followed up with a post outlining some of his reasons for not being a believer. I cant match Cowens distinctive mix of depth and pith, but I thought Id take the liberty of responding to some of his reasons in adialogic style, with my responses edited in between some of his thoughts. Nothing in here should be construed as an attempt to make the Best Argument for God, and the results are rather long and probably extremely self-indulgent, so consider yourself forewarned. But here goes.

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Cowen:Not long ago I outlined what I considered to be the best argument for God, and how origin accounts inevitably seem strange to us; I also argued against some of the presumptive force behind scientific atheism. Yet still I do not believe, so why not?

I have a few reasons: We can distinguish between strange and remain truly strange possibilities for origins, and strange and then somewhat anthropomorphized origin stories. Most religions fall into the latter category, all the more so for Western religions. I see plenty of evidence that human beings anthropomorphize to an excessive degree, and also place too much weight on social information (just look at how worked up they get over social media), so I stick with the strange and remain truly strange options. I dont see those as ruling out theism, but at the end of the day it is more descriptively apt to say I do not believe, rather than asserting belief

The true nature of reality is so strange, Im not sure God or theism is well-defined, at least as can be discussed by human beings. That fact should not lead you to militant atheism (I also cant define subatomic particles), but still it pushes me toward an I dont believe attitude more than belief. I find it hard to say I believe in something that I feel in principle I cannot define, nor can anyone else.

Me:Perhaps, but since you raise the strangeness of subatomic particles you might consider a third possibility for thinking about origins: Alongside strange and remain truly strange and strange and then somewhat anthropomorphized, there might be a category that you could call anthropomorphic/accessible on the surface and then somewhat stranger the deeper down you go.

This often seems to be the nature of physical reality as we experience and explore it. When we work on the surface of things, the everyday mechanics of physical cause and effect, we find a lot of clear-seeming laws and comprehensible principles of order. When we go down a level, to where the physical ladders (seem to) start, or up a level, to our own hard-to-fathom experiences of consciousness, we seem to brush up against paradox and mystery. So up to a point the universe yields to our fleshbound consciousness, our evolved-from-apes reasoning abilities, in genuinely extraordinary ways, enabling us to understand, predict, invent and master and explore. But then there are also depths and heights where our scientific efforts seem to trail off, fall short, or end up describing things that seem to us contradictory or impossible.

And by way of analogy it might be that there is a similar pattern in religion and theology. The anthropomorphizing tendency that makes you suspicious, the ascription of human attributes to God and the tendency of the divine to manifest itself in humanoid (if ambiguously so) forms, the role of angels and demons and djinn and demi-godsand saints and so forth in many religious traditions all of this might just reflect a too-pat, too-anthopomorphic, and therefore made-up view of Who or What brought the world into being, Who or What sustains it. But alternatively and plausibly, I think it might represent the ways in which supernaturalrealities are made accessible to human perception,even as their ultimate nature remains beyond our capacities to fully grasp.

Which is, in fact, something that many religious traditions take for granted(the Catholic Church, for instance, does not teach that angels are really splendid androgynes with wings), something thats part ofthe architecture of ordinary belief (most people who habitually visualize God as an old man with a white beard would not so define him if pressed), and a big part of what the adepts of religion, mystics and theologians, tend to stress in their attempts to describe and define the nature of God.

Note, too, that this stress on surface accessibility and deep mysteryis not something invented by clever moderns trying to save the phenomenon of religion from its critics. It is present from ancient times in every major religious tradition, providing a substantial ground of overlap between them David Bentley Hart is good on this, in a book that offers a partial answer to the definitional issue you raise and in Western monotheism it shows up in such not-exactly-obscure places as the Ten Commandments (no graven images for a reason) and the doctrine of the Trinity. (You will not find something that better fits the bill of strange and remains truly strange than what the Fathers of the Church came up with to define the Godhead.) Or, for that matter, in the story of Jesus of Nazareth, who in the gospel narrativesis quite literally an anthropomorphic God, and then after his resurrection becomes, not a simple superman but something stranger sometimes recognizable and sometimes not, physical but transcending the physical, ghostly and yet flesh whose attributes the gospel writers report on in a somewhat amazed style without attempting to circumscribe or technically define.

Again, anthropomorphism is the initial layer, the first mechanism of revelation. The strangeness you understandably think is necessary for plausibility, given our limitations, lies above or down beneath.

Of course the analogy to Newtonian/Einsteinian physics breaks down in various ways, not least of which is that there is often a basic agreement among scientists about the first layer, the understandable and predictable and lawbound aspectsof the physical world, whereas the religious cannot agree upon (or conduct laboratory tests to prove) which anthropomorphic supernatural revelations are trustworthy and should control practice and theological commitment. Thus specific religious belief, as opposed to a general openness to the idea of God, tends to beeither intensely personal, culturally-mediated, probabilistic, or some combination thereof in a way that believing in the laws ofphysics is not. But that brings us to your next point

Cowen: Religious belief has a significant heritable aspect, as does atheism. That should make us all more skeptical about what we think we know about religious truth (the same is true for politics, by the way). I am not sure this perspective favors atheist over theist, but I do think it favors I dont believe over I believe. At the very least, it whittles down the specificity of what I might say I believe in.

I am struck by the frequency with which people believe in the dominant religions of their society or the religion of their family upbringing, perhaps with some modification. (If you meet a Wiccan, dont you jump to the conclusion that they are strange? Or how about a person who believes in an older religion that doesnt have any modern cult presence at all? How many such people are there?)

This narrows my confidence in the judgment of those who believe, since I see them as social conformists to a considerable extent. Again, I am not sure this helps atheism either (contemporary atheists also slot into some pretty standard categories, and are not generally free thinkers), but it is yet another net nudge away from I believe and toward I do not believe. Im just not that swayed by a phenomenon based on social conformity so strongly.

Me: Okay, butas you note the conformity problem exists with every human school of thought and inquiry, every moral and political theory of what is good and what should be condemned. We are always creatures of our time and place and parentage, and converts of any kind not only religious, but political and intellectual are by definition exceptional.

Yetthe cultural contingency of all beliefs does not prevent people from reasonably holdingfairly strong views about a lot of non-religious issues. So its not clear to me why it should requireagnosticism as opposed to humility in belief in religious matters either.

For instance: Does the fact that my heritage and cultural context inclines me to regard human life as sacred mean that I mustretreat to agnosticism about the moral status of the Shoah? (Nazis even more than Wiccans are strange these days, but that doesnt prove that anti-Nazism is just so much cultural prejudice.) Does the bias instilled by the fact they were mostly born and raised in a commercial republicmean that the faculty of George Mason should cease evangelizing on behalfof free-market economics? Yes, moral theory is unlike economics which is unlike theology, but in each case we have plenty of examples of people converted from one view to another by reasoned argument and so long as conversion is possible, the fact that most people dont convert is hardly a knock-out blow against the potential truth of one argument or another, and the value of holding at least provisional commitments.

Moreover just as arguments about moral theory and economics often work because they proceed from a basic conceptual common ground, so too do arguments in religion. Even if choosing a specific religion is a knotty problem, the various religions do have a lot of shared beliefs that supernatural realities exist, at least, and then beyond that commonalities in their ideas of God, and then beyond that in many cases a shared belief in certain revelations.

Your example of Wicca and my own Christianity are in some senses particularly far apart, but in other ways less so, since a Christian might reasonably regard Wiccan beliefs as not so much false as dangerous, touching on realities that might be real but are best left unexplored either because they might be demonic or because they are simply unseely, to borrow the language of the folklorists and poets. The Wiccan, meanwhile, might well have some sort of revisionist Jungian reading of the Christian gospels that incorporates them into her own cosmological picture. Overall, I do not find the Wiccan world-picture nearly as strange and implausible as I find eliminative materialism, and its perfectly possible to have a fruitful Christian-Wiccan argument even if we might have persecuted one another in the past just as its possible to have a fruitful argument between a constitutional monarchist and a republican even though the French Revolution wasa bloody affair.

So theidea that religious controversy is simply a clash of instilled habits, while certainly often true, need not be necessarily true, and (again as with other non-scientificquestions) isnt true when serious people debate the issues in good faith.

I would also add that in the present cultural context most of the believers that you, a professor and blogger, are likely to end up arguing with will be people whose religion is notat all simply an inheritance but rather something reasoned toward and held in defiance of intellectual convention, whereas your agnosticism is presently such an academic commonplace as to be its own form of conformism. It seems to me that by those premises you shouldnarrow your confidence in that agnosticism, and give religious commitment a slightly longer look.

Cowen: I do accept that religion has net practical benefits for both individuals and societies, albeit with some variance. That is partly where the pressures for social conformity come from. I am a strong Straussian when it comes to religion, and overall wish to stick up for the presence of religion in social debate, thus some of my affinities with say Ross Douthat and David Brooks on many issues.

Me: Ill take the affinities I can get though one possible religious response would be to reject this one, on the grounds that (to rip off Flannery OConnor) if its just socially usefulthen to hell with it. But thats not my take; instead, I think the fact that religion has net practical benefits (with some variance as you say!), and not only practical in some strict utilitarian sense but also aesthetic (that religiously-infusedsocieties produce better art and architecture is of course technically a de gustibus issue but come on, its true), is itself suggestive evidence for the claim thatreligious beliefs point to something real. One can come up with plenty of other explanations, but still, a harmony between religious ideas, human flourishing and great aesthetic achievement iscertainly consonant with the idea that we are restless until we rest in Him. And in a similar vein the claims from atheists that if we could pinpoint the evolutionary origins of religious belief we would somehow explain it all away always strike me as strange, because most evolved features of human nature evolved the way they did because they were adapted to some actual reality and why shouldnt the religious instinct be the same? But on to your next point

Cowen: I am frustrated by the lack of Bayesianism in most of the religious belief I observe. Ive never met a believer who asserted: Im really not sure here. But I think Lutheranism is true with p = .018, and the next strongest contender comes in only at .014, so call me Lutheran. The religious people Ive known rebel against that manner of framing, even though during times of conversion they may act on such a basis.

I dont expect all or even most religious believers to present their views this way, but hardly any of them do. That in turn inclines me to think they are using belief for psychological, self-support, and social functions. Nothing wrong with that, says the strong Straussian! But again, it wont get me to belief.

Me:Well sometimes believers dont present things this way because their religion is, as you say above, an inheritance rather than a chosen thing,and so they arent inclined to be Bayesian about it for the same reason that the average patriotic American doesnt give you percentages when you ask what system of government is best. And sometimes they dont because the practice of religion encourages a quest for a personal relationship with God, and once youve embarked on that kind of quest after perhaps making a calculation before you leap, as your point about conversion concedes you cant always be worrying aboutthe percentage odds that youre making a mistake. (There are similar issues in romantic love!)

But theres also plenty of apologetic literature, some of it crude and some of it sophisticated, that makes what amount to implicitly odds-based arguments: Everything from Pascals wager to C.S. Lewiss lunatic/liar/Lord trilemma falls into that broad category, and authors of varying religious traditions, past and present, are constantly making arguments for why their ideas are a better intellectual bet than Muhammeds or Luthers or Joseph Smiths or the Buddhas or whomevers. Indeed its onlyin contemporary liberal circles that these sort of arguments are considered ill-mannered and impolite which, again, might narrow your confidence that the agnosticism assumed in those circles is held for genuinely good, well-thought-through and well-defended reasons.

Also, as it happens, because Im a weirdo I mentally play this kind of Bayesian game with all myself fairly often. For instance, when people ask me what effect Pope Franciss maneuvering around divorce and remarriage might have on my confidence in Catholicisms truth, the answer is thata big enough shift would lead me to downgrade my belief in Catholicisms exclusive truth claims relative to other Christian confessions, and raise the odds that there simply is no One True Church and all the various confessions have pieces of the garment Jesus and the apostles left for us. Whether thinking along those lines is wise or pious is an open question, but oddsmaking definitely forms part of my mental religious architecture. And ifwatching me play the game might help convertyou(I doubt it, but Ill risk the embarrassment), Ill play it at the very end of our dialogue but first lets take up your last two points.

Cowen: I do take the William James arguments about personal experience of God seriously, and I recommend hisThe Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Natureto everybody its one of the best books period. But these personal accounts contradict each other in many cases, we know at least some of them are wrong or delusional, and overall I think the capacity of human beings to believe things some would call it self-deception but that term assumes a neutral, objective base more than is warranted here is quite strong. Presumably a Christian believes that pagan accounts of the gods are incorrect, and vice versa; I say they are probably both right in their criticisms of the other.

Me: My sense of things is that mystical experience tracks the pattern I noted above: Theres a commonality at the level of the ineffable, where mystics Western and Eastern, Christian and Sufi tend to sound somewhat alike in their descriptions of what they cant describe, and then theres diversity and contradiction when it comes to the more anthropomorphized encounters, where angels or the Virgin Mary or the God Krishna show up to deliver a vision or a message.

This diversity and contradiction is a good reason to be wary of founding your religious beliefs on any single persons experience or message, and it might be a case against dogmatism in religion, period. But I think even if you dont find any particular revelation convincing enough to let it control how you interpret the entire cosmos, a more parsimonious explanation than mass delusion and self-deception could still lead you reasonably to the forms of religious syncretism that were common in the pre-Christian world, to the pagan traditions that treat the gods of polytheism as personalized and localized manifestations of the Godhead, or to pantheism or gnosticism in their various forms. We see through a glass darkly, but the fact that we are all catching different glimpses of divinity should make us suspect that while the differences counsel humility, there really is something there to see.

And I would add that as a Christian I dont regard the pagan accounts of the gods as precisely wrong so much as partial, mythologized (often consciously and deliberately), and incomplete. There is nothing in Christian cosmology that precludes the Christian God manifesting Himself partially in non-Christian societies through mystical encounters that are experienced and interpreted in line with pre-existing beliefs, and indeed Christians (especially in the Catholic tradition) have in many case appropriated pagan traditions by treating them, in part, as providentially-intended preparations for Christianity.

At the same time Christians also believe as a matter of faith that there are other spiritual powers in the universe besides the Triune God, which allows for the belief that pagan accounts might reflect angelic or demonic encounters. And finally there is also nothing in Christian cosmology that precludes the possibility of other forces besides angels and demons. In the early Old Testament its quite a while before the Israelites discover, as it were, that the God speaking to them is different in kind rather than degree from other gods; nobody knows who the Nephilim were; belief in ghosts is as common in Christian cultures as in others; medieval and early modern Europeans often treated the realm of faerie as a kind of third space, a nonaligned spiritual territory, and in some cases explicitly re-read and rewrote their ancestors pagan traditions as faerie stories.

These kind of attempted reconciliations are obviously unnecessary if you dont accept the Christian revelation. My point is just that even if you do, the possible validity of a range of diverse and contradictory-seeming religious encounters doesnt have to go out the window. Indeed even when encounters happen completely under the metaphysical canopy of Catholic belief, the church itself can still end up concluding as it seems to be with the mystics of Medjugorje that some of them are really heaven-sent and some are not, that the same person or group of people can have a real vision and then subsequently a false or made-up or misinterpreted one. Even where God seems to be breaking in or speaking unusually directly, the through-a-glass-darkly rule still applies.

Cowen: I see the entire matter of origins as so strange that the transcendental argument carries little weight with me if there is no God, then everything is permitted!We dont have enough understanding of God, or the absence of God, to deal with such claims.In any case, the existence of God is no guarantee that such problems are overcome, or if it were such a guarantee, you wouldnt be able to know that.

Me: This seems like an overstated response to an overstated claim. I agree, there are conceptions of the Absolute that would justify all sorts of (what we would consider) atrocities and conceptions of His non-existence that still persuade people to be moral realists rather than ax-wielding Raskolnikovs. But consider a more modest version of the argument: Namely, that the Judeo-Christian conception of the nature of God and the modern small-l liberal consensus on human rights and moral wrongs cohere together fairly well, as a picture of how the universe and moral universals interconnect, whereas that same liberal consensus is a much poorer fit with the de facto atheism and materialism of many of its present-day proponents.

I think this modest claim is simply, well, true: Schemes for a Darwinian ethics generally have a brazen artificiality to them when they arent leaping merrily toward tooth-and-claw, might-makes-right conclusions; in the genealogy of modern morals the Christian worldview is a progenitor of rights-based liberalism in a fairly straightforward and logically-consistent way; and the alternative syntheses are a bit more forced, a bit dodgier, and a bit prone to suddenly giving way, as the major 20th century attempts at genuinely post-Christian and post-liberal societies conspicuously did, to screaming hellscapes that everyone these days considers simply evil.

I concede that a worldviews coherence doesnt prove anything definitive about its truth. You can certainly preserve a preference for human rights or any other feature of the contemporary consensus on non-theological grounds. But in the quest for truth, coherence still seems like a useful signpost, and looking for its presence still seems like a decent-enough place to start.

Cowen: Add all that up and I just dont believe.Furthermore, I find it easy not to believe. It doesnt stress me, and I dont feel a resulting gap or absence in my life. That I strongly suspect is for genetic reasons, not because of some intellectual argument I or others have come up with. But there you go, the deconstruction of my own belief actually pushes me somewhat further into it.

Me: This is weak sauce, Tyler. Youve just complained about the ethno-cultural pattern in belief and why it makes you more skeptical of religious truth claims. If you think you have a genetic bias toward a happy agnosticism, shouldnt that sort of deconstruction make you more intellectually skeptical of your own irreligious conclusions, not less especially since, again, agnosticism in our own era comes with higher social status in the academic circles you inhabit than does actual religious commitment? The world is very strange, Im comfortable leaving it at that is not a conclusion you would accept in the debates to which you are personally-cum-genetically predisposed. Doesnt your willingness to accept it on this question, one whose great importance I hope you would be willing to concede, seems a touch what word should I reach for ah, perhaps complacent? Arent you manifesting the very vice you just spent a book critiquing, however gently, in your fellow Western Brahmins? Why not be the change you seek?

As I admitted above, the game that a man of your Bayesian temperament would need to play to get to some limited form of religious commitment might seem a little ridiculous or embarrassing or flippant. But as I promised, Ill play it now myself.

What Im looking for when I gamble on a world-picture is something that makes sense of the four major features of existence that give rise to religious questions the striking fact of cosmic order, our distinctive consciousness, our strong moral sense and thirst for justice and the persistent varieties of supernatural experience. The various forms of materialism strike me as very weak on all four counts, and the odds that what Thomas Nagel called the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is true therefore seem quite low. All these numbers will be a little arbitrary, but for the sake of the game Ill set the probability that a hard materialism accurately describes reality at 2 percent (and I think Im being generous there).

So what does? Well, if you decide treat every religious revelation as essentially equally plausible or implausible and decline to choose between them, the best world-picture candidates are either a form of classical theism as it would have been understood by most pre-modern thinkers and continues to be understood by many theologians today (again, read David Bentley Hart for a recent and compelling case), or else a form of pantheism or panentheism or panpsychism in which God/consciousness/the universe are in some sense overlapping categories, and all spiritual/supernatural experiences are partial and personal and culturally mediated glimpses of a unity.

Both of these possibilities seem to have more explanatory power across my four categories than does, say, a hard deism (which makes the varieties of religious experience a lot harder to explain) or a dualism or a gnosticism (both of which seem a little unparsimonious, and also somewhat poor fits for the data of religious experience) or a literalist polytheism (which begs too many questions about cosmic order, which is why philosophically-serious polytheists often tend to be pantheists or classical theists at bottom). And the latter possibility, some sort of pantheism, seems to be where a lot of post-Christians who are too sensible or too experienced to accept a stringent atheism are drifting it shows up in different forms in writers like Barbara Ehrenreich, Sam Harris, Thomas Nagel, Anthony Kronman, even Philip Pullman, and it pervades a great deal of pop spirituality these days. Indeed it might be where I would end up if I radically changed my mind about the credibility of the Christian story; Im not entirely sure. (It would probably come down to questions of theodicy; Ill spare you the provisional thought process.)

For now, Ill give odds as follows (again, treating all revelations equally): Classical theism 45 percent, the pantheistic big tent 40 percent, gnosticism 6 percent, hard no supernatural deism 4 percent, dualism 3 percent. Which still leaves that 2 percent chance that Daniel Dennett has it right.

I told you this would seem a bit silly (and I know Im leaving out various combinations and permutations, sorry, maybe someday Ill tackle process theology but not today). But pressing on, I dont actually think you can treat all revelations equally, because theyre all so strikingly different and theres no good reason to treat them interchangeably. Instead, I think what youre looking for is a kind of black swan among revelations, a tradition that seems particularly plausible in the historical grounding of its claims and whose theological implications fit in well with the combination I proposed to you earlier, the mix of the comprehensible and the unfathomable that would do justice both to a divine Otherness and a divine desire to be known by us, the most godlike (and devil-like) beings in the created universe so far as we can tell.

And, no surprise here, I think the combination of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is the darkest swan in the sea of religious stories the compendium of stories, histories, poems and prophecies and parables and eyewitness accounts that most suggests an actual unfolding divine revelation, and whose unlikely but overwhelming role as a history-shaping force endures even in what is supposed to be our oh-so-disenchanted world. As a wise man once remarked (it was you), the Bible as a whole is one of the most beautiful, strange, and open-to-multiple-interpretation books that there is, and its emergence from a minor but oddly-resilient nation of Semites is both more strikingly unlikely and less contingent on a single religious personality than the genesis of any other holy book and thats even before you dig into what Christians consider its culminating revelation, a miraculous story that unfolds not in myth or prehistory but at an apex of earthly civilization, in the harsh light of recorded history, with multiple overlapping testimonies to its reality that two thousand years of criticism have not even begun to convincingly discredit.

Reasonable people can disagree with this take, but thats mine. Im betting on the Judeo-Christian story as an extended revelation unlike any other on the theology that the early Christians came up with to explain what happened in their midst, which balances the reasonable with the paradoxical in ways that fit the ordered strangeness of reality itself on Christianitys subsequent world-altering influence as a fulfillment of the brazenly implausible predictions that both Israels prophets and the gospel writers made about just how far Yahwehs rule could spread and finally on the mix of consistency and resilience, revival and reinvention in the central strand of Christianity across two millennia, which is why I make my home in the Roman Catholic Church.

You want those embarrassingly crude numbers on all this? Fine. Lets give Western monotheism a 60 percent chance of containing the most important and dispositive revelation. Then within Western monotheism, Judaism alone seems to me much less likely than does Christianity and Judaism together, so Id put Judaism-as-primary-revelation at 20 percent, Christianity as the fulfillment of Judaism at 65 percent, some Jewish-Christian-Islamic synthesis that weve failed to grasp at 10 percent, and Muhammed as the seal of the prophets at 5 percent. Then within Christianity itself, lets give it a 50 percent chance that Roman Catholicism is the truest church (pending Francis-era developments, as I said), a 20 percent chance that Catholicism and Orthodoxy have an equal claim, a 5 percent chance thats its Orthodoxy alone, a 10 percent chance for the Anabaptists, a 5 percent chance for the Calvinists, and 10 percent that the church is simply too broken for any specific body to have exclusive claims, in which case nondenominationals and big-tent Anglicans probably have the right approach.

There: Ive probably blasphemed, weakened my Catholic credentials, endangered my soul, insulted my religious brethren, picked pointless fights with Muslims and Calvinists, and betrayed a juvenile understanding of statistics.

So the least you can do, Tyler, after all of this, is to spend a few more Sundays in your local church.

View post:
Should Tyler Cowen Believe in God? - New York Times (blog)

ABEAN Contains Twelve Statements

Although I cannot provide a comprehensive critique of Hinmans ABEAN argument in just two blog posts (of reasonable length), I can at least briefly touch on each of the dozen statements in that argument.

[NOTE: ABEAN is an acronym that refers tothe claim that some Aspect of Being is Eternal And Necessary.]

The statements in ABEAN are numbered (1) through (11), but there is an additional statement that Hinman should have made, but that he did not make clearly and explicitly. There is a little bit of text in brackets following premise (4):

[=GOB]

There is a similar notation following premise (6):

[=SON]

The notation following premise (6) merely indicates an acronym that will be used as shorthand for the phrasea Sense Of the Numinous, a term that was already being used in premise (6). So, the notation following (6) does not assert anything or add anything to (6).

However, the notation following premise (4) asserts a substantive claim, which Hinman ought to have spelled out as a separate premise:

(A) The Ground of Being is identical with anyaspect of being that is eternal and necessary.

The notation [=GOB] does NOT merely specify an acronym for a term already present in the argument; rather, it introduces a new and additional concept into the argument, a concept that is very unclear. Since premise (A) includes at least threeunclear terms (The Ground of Being, any aspect of being that is, and eternal), I judge this premise to be VERY unclear.

The ABEAN Argument is VERY UNCLEAR

The main problem with the ABEAN argument is that it is UNCLEAR. This is the same problem that I encountered repeatedly in my analysis and evaluation of Norman Geislers case for God in his bookWhen Skeptics Ask. The problem is not so much that ABEAN uses false premises or invalid inferences. The problem is that nearly every claim in the argument is unclear, making it nearly impossible to rationally evaluate the argument.

In my view, ten out of the twelve statements that make up ABEAN are VERY UNCLEAR. Only one statement in ABEAN is clear, and there is one statement that is somewhat unclear (but less than very unclear). So, in my view, more than 80% of the statements in ABEAN are VERY UNCLEAR, and less than 10% of the statements in ABEAN are clear (only 1 statement out of 12). Given the prevalence of VERY UNCLEAR statements, it is reasonable to characterize the whole argument as being VERY UNCLEAR, and thus for all practical intents and purposes it is impossible to rationally evaluate ABEAN. As it stands, ABEANis little more than a heap of words without much intellectual or philosophical significance.

If Mr. Hinman were to provideclear definitions for the many problematic words and phrases in his ABEAN argument, then it would be possible to rationally evaluate this argument, but I suspect that if he could have provided such definitions then he would have done so already. So, Im doubtful that he will be providing clear definitions for all of the many problematic words and phrases in ABEAN.

Here is my view of the general unclarity of Hinmans ABEAN argument (click on image below for a betterview of the chart):

The unclarity that I based this chart on is the unclarity of the meaning of several problematic words and phrases:

The terms necessary and contingent are also problematic words, but Hinman provides fairly clear definitions of these two words, which in turn made it possible for me to evaluate the inference from premises (1) and (4) to premise (5) as being an INVALID inference (see Part 2 of this series). The one time that Hinman provides clear definitions, makes it clear that ABEAN is a bad argument. This is why, I suspect, that Geisler and Hinman are so unclear and fuzzy-headed when they argue for God. When they think and reason clearly, their arguments for God fall apart.

I judged premises (1), (2), (4), (A), (5), (7), (8), (9), (10), and (11) to be VERY UNCLEAR because they each contain at least two different unclear words or phrases, which Hinman failed to adequatelydefine or explain.

I judged premise (6) to be UNCLEAR, but not to be VERY UNCLEAR, because of the use of the phrase a sense of the numinous in that premise. Given the subjective nature of that concept, it would be difficult for anyone to provide a clear definition of that phrase, and Hinman did make a brief attempt to provide some clarification of this term, but his attempt was inadequate in my judgment. As it stands, this phrase is too vague to allow one to make a rational evaluation of the truth or falsehood of premises (7) or (8)with any degree of confidence.

How Many Possible Interpretations are there of ABEAN?

The easiest sort of unclarity to fix is ambiguity. There are eight different unclear words or phrases used in ABEAN. (NOTE: some of the unclear words and phrases in the list above are not used in the ABEAN argument, but are used in definitions of terms.) Most of these unclear words or phrases have MANYdifferent possible meanings, not just two. So, most of these unclear words or phrases have a more serious problem than that of being ambiguous between two alternative meanings.

But, for the sake of illustration, lets assume that all eight unclear words or phrases each have only two alternative meanings. Lets also assume that these words or phrases are consistently used with the same meaning inall premises where they occur. How many different possible interpretations of ABEAN wouldthere be, based on those assumptions? There would be 2 to the 8th power different interpretations of ABEAN:

2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 = 16 x 16 = 256 Different Possible Interpretations

There are well over two hundred different possible interpretations of ABEAN if the unclear words and phrases in the argument each have only two possible meanings. But most of the unclear words and phrases have a more serious problem of unclarity than this, so it would not be unreasonable to estimate that there is an average of three different possible meanings for each of the unclear words and phrases. How many possible interpretations of ABEAN would there be on that assumption? There would be 3 to the 8th power different interpretations of ABEAN:

3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 = 9 x 9 x 9 x 9 = 81 x 81 = 6,561 Different Possible Interpretations

Given these two estimates of the number of different possible interpretations of ABEAN, it is reasonable to conclude that it is very likely that there are more than 200 but less than 7,000 different possible interpretations of ABEAN. So, I would need at least 200 blog posts to adequately evaluate all of the various possible interpretations of ABEAN. Not gonna happen. Wouldnt be prudent. I have better things to do with my time.

One Premise in ABEAN is OK

Im OK with premise (3):

3. Something did not come from nothing.

The wording and clarity could be slightly improved:

3a. It is NOT the case that something came from nothing.

I accept this premise as true, although Im not entirely certain that it is true. I think it is based on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and Im inclined to accept that principle (i.e. Every event has an explanation.)

A Couple of Other Problems with ABEAN

I havemany objections and concerns about ABEAN in addition to the basic problem of unclear words and phrases. But I will just mention two of those problems here. One objection concerns the statement that Hinman failed to make clearly and explicitly:

(A) The Ground of Beingis identical withanyaspect of being that is eternal and necessary.

Premise (4) asserts that Some aspect of being is eternal and necessary. The word some is ambiguous here, just like the word something as used by Aquinas and by Geisler in their arguments for God. What premise (4) actually means is this:

4a. Some aspect or aspects of being are eternal and necessary.

There is no reason or justification given for limiting the relevant aspects to just ONE aspect. So, we have, yet again, an ambiguity in quantification that leads to confusion and illogical inferences. If there are many aspects of being, and if more than one aspect of being is eternal and necessary, then that casts doubt on premise (A). If there are multiple aspects of being that are eternal and necessary, then it is doubtful that we ought to identify the Ground of Being with that collection of aspects.

This is particularly the case if an aspect of being is an individual thing or event. The concept of an aspect of being is VERY UNCLEAR, so it is not at all obvious that we can rule out the possibility that individual things or events could count as aspects of being. Clearly, Mr. Hinman would NOT accept the idea that the Ground of Being is composed of various individual things or events (that would lead us in the direction of Polytheism or Pantheism), so the identification of the Ground of Being with some aspect or aspects of being might well turn out to be an incoherent claim, a claim that contradicts the implicationsof Hinmansconcept of the Ground of Being.

This is one more example that illustrates the need for clear definitions of problematic words and phrases such as an aspect of being and the Ground of Being. Without such definitions, we may well be stumbling over various logical errors and incoherent claims.

I also have a problem with premise (9):

9. GOB = God.

First of all, this premise needs to be spelled out in a clear sentence of English:

9a. The Ground of Being is identical with God.

Although Hinman fails to provide a clear definition of the Ground of Being or ofthe word eternal, I strongly suspect that by eternal he means outside of time, and it is clear that Hinman believes the Ground of Being to be eternal. Given these assumptions, it follows that the Ground of Being cannot change.

But God is a person, or at least a being with personal characteristics like can think, can communicate, can make choices, and can perform actions. But only a being that can change can have such personal characteristics. Therefore, given the assumption that the Ground of Being is something that is outside of time it follows that the Ground of Being is NOT identical with God. Premise (9) appears to be false.

So, premise (A) might well, for all we know, be an incoherent statement, and premise (9) appears to be false.

Originally posted here:
Hinman's ABEAN Argument Part 3: More Objections - Patheos (blog)

Pantheism is the view that the world is either identical to God, or an expression of Gods nature. It comes from pan meaning all, and theism, which means belief in God. So according to pantheism, God is everything and everything is God.

First, pantheism rejects the idea that God is transcendent. According to traditional Western conceptions of God, He is an entity that is above and beyond the universe. So, although God may be fully present in the universe, He is also outside of it. Simply put, He transcends the totality of objects in the world. When pantheists say that God is everything and everything is God, this is meant to capture that idea that God does not transcend the world.

A second important difference between pantheism and traditional theistic religions is that pantheists also reject the idea of Gods personhood. The pantheist God is not a personal God, the kind of entity that could have beliefs, desires, intentions, or agency. Unlike the traditional God of theism, the pantheistic God does not have a will and cannot act in or upon the universe. These are the kind of things that only a person, or a person-like entity, could do. For the pantheist, God is the non-personal divinity that pervades all existence. It is the divine Unity of the world.

While these two points may clarify how pantheism and traditional theism differ, they may make us wonder if theres much difference between pantheism and atheism. After all, pantheism denies the existence of a transcendent, personal God, which is the God of traditional theism. So, in that sense, pantheism seems to be a form of atheism. Its not clear what exactly pantheists are talking about when they talk of God. If pantheists just consider God to be the totality of all existence, then why talk of God at all? Moreover, if thats what God means to the pantheist, then the slogan God is everything and everything is God now seems circular and redundant. As Schopenhauer, a critic of pantheism, says, to call the world God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word world.

But Schopenhauer seems to be operating with a very narrow definition of God here. Why suppose that God must be personal and transcendent in order to be God? This limits the concept of God in an ad hoc way that privileges the traditional theistic view of divinity. Looking at other non-theistic religious traditions, we find many conceptions of a divinity that pervades all existence, like Lao Tzus Tao, Sankaras Brahman, and arguably also Hegels Geist and Plotinuss One. To call all these views atheist simply because they reject the traditional theistic conception of a personal, transcendent God is to miss the point. Atheism, after all, is not a religion.

If we accept that pantheism differs from atheism, in that it does posit some kind of divinity in the world whereas atheism does not, its still a little difficult to see in what sense pantheism is a religion. There are no pantheist churches or services, for example, and its not even clear if there are any particular pantheist rituals or practices. Do practices like prayer or worship even make sense in the pantheist scheme of things?

Love of nature is often associated with pantheism, but that does not seem to be a central tenet of the religion. Self-professed pantheists like Wordsworth, Whitman, and other Romantic poets certainly had a deep love of nature, but that was not necessarily the case for pantheists like Spinoza and Lao Tzu. Nevertheless, for some pantheists the idea that nature is something that inspires awe, wonder, and reverence is important. This attitude toward nature is perhaps what motivates many contemporary pantheists to identify themselves as such. It is no coincidence that there are strong ties between pantheism and the ecology movement.

Given some of the issues raised here, I look forward to having a number of questions clarified during our upcoming show. One important question is: what exactly is the relationship between pantheism and atheism? Are they complementary or conflicting views of the world? Can we distinguish pantheism from traditional theism without the view simply collapsing into atheism? Is pantheism really a religion, or just a metaphysical view of the world? Does it have distinctive rituals or practices? What would motivate someone to identify as a pantheist? And how central is reverence for nature to pantheism?

Joining the conversation with John and Ken will be Philip Clayton, Dean of the Claremont School of Theology and Provost of Claremont Lincoln University. He is also the co-author of The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy and Faith.

Continue reading here:
Pantheism | Philosophy Talk

Photo Credit: Courtesy

It is most disturbing that for the second time in almost 315 years the celebrated S&P (Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community of London), an affiliate of its mother synagogue in Amsterdam (of which many of my ancestors have been members for generations), is at the center of a major eruption within Orthodox Judaism due to the small-mindedness and deliberate misinterpretation of their rabbis views by some of his colleagues.

On the 20th of November 1703, the venerable Chacham David Nieto (1654-1728), chief rabbi of the S&P and a great Talmudic scholar, philosopher, mathematician, and author of his remarkable magnum opus, Matteh Dan, was accused of being a secret follower of the Dutch, Jewish, Portuguese-Spanish world class philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), who had turned his back on Judaism and declared that God was transcendent but not immanent, denying His involvement in the affairs of humankind and even His being the Creator of the universe. This doctrine, called pantheism, also suggests that God is not a Personality to Whom we are able to speak, or Who can reveal Himself to humankind through some type of verbal communication.

Chacham Nieto, in an attempt to refute deism (a very popular belief among philosophers of his time), which teaches that the living God created the universe but is no longer involved in it or in the affairs of humankind, said that God and nature are one and the same. By this he meant to say that God is not only transcendent but also immanent and, as such, deeply involved in the world. Unfortunately, he used the same words that Spinoza had used to explain his pantheistic views: God and nature are the same. Misunderstanding Chacham Nietos words, the Maamad (lay leadership of the S&P) thought that he was supporting Spinozas pantheism. They accused him of heresy and wanted to fire him. When this matter came to a head, shaking the foundations of the community, with far-reaching consequences for its future and for Judaism in general, they wisely decided to ask the opinion of the world-famous Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Ashkenazi (c.1660-1718), also called the Chacham Tzvi, the former chief rabbi of the Ashkhenazic community in Amsterdam who was then living in Altona, Germany. The rabbi convened his beit din, studied all the relevant material from both sides, and vindicated Chacham Nieto completely, telling the leaders of the S&P that they had misunderstood their rabbi and that he must continue as their religious leader (1). This ended a most unfortunate controversy and dangerous development within Judaism.

Now, more than 300 years later, a new scandal with major ramifications is again erupting around the S&P this time, regarding a lecture on homosexuality given by its venerable Senior Rabbi Joseph Dweck. In this case, however, it is not the lay leaders of the S&P who accuse their rabbi of heresy (in fact, they are standing with him) but some influential rabbis in England and abroad who felt the need to accuse Rabbi Dweck of heresy. In a tirade of mostly meaningless words, they attacked his integrity, faith and scholarship, calling him a wicked person and using even worse descriptions. By doing so, they showed ignorance, bias and self-interest and, above all, as in the case of Chacham Nieto, they completely and probably deliberately misinterpreted what the rabbi said.

In this remarkable lecture at the Ner Yisrael Synagogue, where the congregation is led by my dear friend Rabbi Dr. Avraham (Alan) Kimche, Rabbi Dweck presented an entirely new way of understanding homosexuality. Drawing on non-Jewish historical sources, he explained that homosexuality was an accepted lifestyle in the ancient non-Jewish world and, quoting many Jewish classical sources, he then specified what the prohibition of homosexuality in Halacha is all about and what is not prohibited in a same-sex, male loving relationship. He presented the different points of view and their nuances, and expressed the idea that current Western attitudes toward sexuality force traditional Judaism to rethink some of its core values, as it has always done when challenged. While it is true that Rabbi Dweck used some unfortunate phrases in the heat of his argument (What speaker doesnt, from time to time?), nothing that he said was outside the boundaries of established Halacha.

In fact, much of what he argued had already been said by Rabbi Chaim Rapoport, a great halachic scholar in London, in his well-known book Judaism and Homosexuality: An Authentic Orthodox View,for which I wrote an approbation and which carries a foreword by Emeritus Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and a preface by the late Dayan Berel Berkovits of the Beth Din of the (Orthodox) Federation of Synagogues in London.

However, that didnt stop Rabbi Dwecks rabbinical opponents from deliberately misrepresenting him. Nothing but fear, lack of knowledge about homosexuality, and personal (not so kosher) reasons seem to have motivated them.

One rabbi felt the need to scrutinize all of Rabbi Dwecks lectures from the time he came to live in London a witch hunt of sorts looking for possible mistakes the rabbi may have made in earlier lectures so as to undermine his reputation, as if no Orthodox rabbis ever make mistakes in some of their rulings. He completely ignored the fact that Rabbi Dweck comes from a different Sefardic-Syrian tradition with its own (halachic) practices and religious outlook on life.

Rabbi Dweck is married to the granddaughter of Chacham Ovadia Yosef, zl, former chief rabbi of Israel. But that didnt prevent the current Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef and his brother Rabbi David Yosef both sons of Rav Ovadia from refusing to see him (their own nephew) when he asked for a meeting. In fact, both wrote a letter to the Sefardic communities of New York and New Jersey condemning Rabbi Dweck (while never mentioning his name!) and asking for his dismissal, thereby showing lamentable small-mindedness, a lack of general knowledge, and ignorance of the Jewish religious philosophical tradition.

I have been told by reliable sources that by now Rabbi Dwecks weekly lectures have been cancelled and his former lectures removed from the Internet. Not only is this a grave injustice but it greatly harms his remarkable and most successful influence in London and beyond, in bringing people closer to our holy Torah.

The great danger of this unfortunate affair is not just the controversy surrounding Rabbi Dweck. More than anything else, it is an indication of where British or perhaps all European Orthodoxy is heading. When Orthodox rabbis are told that they are no longer able to speak their minds, offer new insights into Orthodox Judaism, or try to find solutions to serious problems by using innovative ideas, we are faced with a rabbinical world that is wearing blinders, is comprised of yes-people looking over their shoulders, and is generating a hazardous small-mindedness that has far-reaching effects.

Sure, there have always been differences of opinion within Rabbinic Judaism. This is healthy, and Judaism has only benefitted from it. But this was always done in a framework of well-informed argument and discussion, not in tirades of meaningless and hateful statements.

One of the biggest problems of current mainstream Orthodoxy is that it believes it is always right, knows all the sources, and doesnt need to be apprised of new information coming from our traditional sources. The consequences are that it is rewriting Orthodoxy in ways that sometimes make authentic Judaism unrecognizable.

What rabbis like those attacking Rabbi Dweck do not realize is that they are slowly but surely becoming irrelevant. They may be great Talmudic scholars, but instead of using their exceptional knowledge to make Orthodox Judaism more and more vibrant, they drown in it and become stuck in the quicksand of intransigence, which they themselves have created.

The danger is that in their stubbornness they take down all of British Orthodoxy, which seems to be unaware or too immature to understand what is happening.

The task of great rabbis is to jump aboard the sinking ship of Orthodoxy, with knives between their teeth, ensuring that a fearless Judaism, in full sail and in full force, will sail the ship of Torah into the midst of the sea of our lives.

I call on:

The venerable British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and his beit din to unequivocally condemn the attacks on Rabbi Dweck and stand staunchly behind him;

Emeritus Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks to join Rabbi Mirvis in this endeavor;

My dear friend Rabbi Dr. Alan Kimche to resume Rabbi Dwecks lectures in his community without further delay;

The relevant parties to restore Rabbi Dwecks lectures on the Internet;

The S&P to continue to show courage and to oppose with full force any attempt to fire Rabbi Dweck and/or discredit him;

The New York and New Jersey communities to immediately invite Rabbi Dweck to be their scholar in residence again;

Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef, Rabbi David Yosef, and other rabbis to cease harassing Rabbi Dweck and subjecting him to a meaningless inquisition; to begin listening to what he has actually been saying; and to stop the witch hunt, which has no place in authentic Orthodox Judaism.

And I call on Rabbi Dweck himself to continue leading and inspiring the S&P with pride and self-confidence and spreading Torah wherever possible. Let him not forget the wise words of Jonathan Swift: Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent (2).

Let us hope that this story will end in the same way as did the attack on Chacham Nieto, once again proving the power of Judaism when confronted with the lamentable closing of current rabbinic minds.

*****

(1) See ResponsaChacham Tzvi, responsum # 18 (Amsterdam, 1712). See also: Jakob J. Petuchowsky, The Theology of Haham David Nieto: An Eighteenth Century Defence of the Jewish Tradition (NY: KTAV Publishing House, 1970).

(2) From Swifts satirical essay, Various Thoughts, Moral and Diverting, first appeared in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (Leicester, UK: Scolar Press, 1711).

Read more from the original source:
A Modern Day Inquisition: Rabbi Joseph Dweck - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com

Stephen Hawking, arguably the most famous living scientist in the world, now says that the intervention of a divine being in the creation of the universe is not necessary.

Never mind that the title of his last book, The Grand Design, seems to contradict this assertion. What we have here is the failure to philosophize.

In his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking was widely seen to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. In that book he wrote, If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason for then we should know the mind of God.

He now intones, It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

But it was never necessary for a thinking and feeling person to invoke a Creator to explain creation. So the question is, what does Stephen mean by God, and what do we?

This is the ultimate example of how the word is not the thing. The word God can stand for anything, with perhaps as many definitions as there are humans on earth. But is there an actuality, which the completely silent mind can directly commune?

Obviously I feel there is, since its one of the main themes of this column. But Im not trying to convince anyone of it, simply saying: question, experiment and find out for yourself.

Refuting theism does not mean invoking concepts like pantheism and panentheism. Doing so prevents the experiencing of immanence. Conceptualizing has to completely cease for experiencing that which is called God.

Unwittingly, Hawking is making a case for how scientific discoveries and knowledge are compatible with a mystical understanding of God.

Science has been steadily undercutting the human projection of an all-knowing separate Creator, while making the miracle of intrinsic, ongoing creation more and more evident. Theres no need for a Creator standing apart and setting the whole shebang in motion (and occasionally intervening.)

On the other hand, Hawkings view of the universe and human beings has unexamined philosophical assumptions woven into it. These can be seen when we unpack statements like:

The fact that we human beings who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph.

As many contributions as Stephen Hawking has made to science, the idea that human beings (and more to the point, the human brain) are mere collections of fundamental particles is, to my mind, a deeply mistaken view of the universe and the human beings place in it.

It is mere reductionism, which is necessary for doing science, but represents the rejection of the human capacity for holistic perception, which is essential to being fully human.

It is also deeply anthropocentric, putting the human mind, with respect to reason and its capability for scientific knowledge, at the center of creation.

Im not arguing for keeping some projection of God at the center of creation; Im saying there is no center of creation.

There is ongoing creation however, and it is a mystery that science will never be able to encompass with knowledge, no matter how far science extends knowledge. Experiencing the numinous only takes place when the movement of knowledge and the known has ceased.

Hawking sets up a classic straw man when he says that the discovery, in 1992, of a planet orbiting a distant star was the first blow to Newtons belief that the universe could not have arisen from chaos.

That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings, he writes.

Hes not arguing against an immanent God in this revealing bit of diversion, but against the insight that there is no disorder or chaos in nature, because there is an underling order in the universe since the beginning of time.

Hawking is proffering the dogmatic atheists view that everything is randomness, and that chance can account for everything we see, everything we are, and everything we are capable of being.

That is simply false. Its actually order all the way down, not chaos evolving into order, culminating in the human mind. Thats as anthropocentric in its own way as the Christian belief that the earth was made for man.

The universe wasnt created out of chaos; indeed, it wasnt created at all. There is no such thing as chaos, or disorder for that matter, except with man and creatures like him, wherever they may exist at our stage in the cosmos.

God is synonymous with the universe, as well as non-separatively beyond it. Evil has no supernatural aspect either (though, unlike the universe/God, is man-made).

This means God is a completely different actuality than Stephen Hawking or anyone can conceive or imagine.

Martin LeFevre

Go here to read the rest:
The Universe Is the Mind of God - The Costa Rican Times

This is my last column describing the meaning and history of Progressive Christianity. Finishing our historical journey, let me mention a few more people who have contributed to Progressive Christian thought.

Martin Buber (1878-1965) was an Austrian-born Israeli Jewish philosopher best known for his book "I and Thou," which focused on the way humans relate to their world.

According to Buber, we frequently view both objects and people by their functions. Doing this is sometimes good: when doctors examine us for specific maladies, it's best if they view us as organisms, not as individuals.

Scientists can learn a great deal about our world by observing, measuring and examining. For Buber, all such processes are I-It relationships.

Unfortunately, we frequently view people in the same way. Rather than truly making ourselves completely available to them, understanding them, sharing totally with them, really talking with them, we observe them or keep part of ourselves outside the moment of relationship.

Buber calls such an interaction I-It. It is possible, notes Buber, to place ourselves completely into a relationship, to truly understand and "be there" with another person, without masks, pretenses, even without words. Such a moment of relating is called "I-Thou."

The bond thus created enlarges each person, and each person responds by trying to enhance the other person. The result is true dialogue, true sharing. Buber then moves from this existential description of personal relating to the religious experience. For Buber, God is the Eternal Thou. Yet another concept of God to consider.

Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) was an American philosopher who concentrated primarily on the philosophy of religion and metaphysics. He developed the neoclassical idea of God and produced a modal proof of the existence of God that was a development of St. Anselm's Ontological Argument.

Hartshorne is also noted for developing Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy into process theology, a component of Progressive Christianity. One of the technical terms Hartshorne used is pan-en-theism. Panentheism (all is in God) must be differentiated from classical pantheism (all is God).

In Hartshorne's theology, God is not identical with the world, but God is also not completely independent from the world. God has his self-identity that transcends the Earth, but the world is also contained within God. A rough analogy is the relationship between a mother and a fetus. The mother has her own identity and is different from the unborn, yet is intimately connected to the unborn. The unborn is within the womb and attached to the mother via the umbilical cord.

Next, Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) was a German Lutheran theologian and professor of New Testament at the University of Marburg. He was one of the major figures of early 20th century biblical studies and a prominent voice in liberal Christianity.

Bultmann is known for his belief that the historical analysis of the New Testament is both futile and unnecessary, given that the earliest Christian literature showed little interest in specific locations. Bultmann argued that all that matters is the "thatness," not the "whatness" of Jesus; i.e. only that Jesus existed, preached and died by Crucifixion matters, not what happened throughout his life. Bultmann contended that only faith in the kerygma, or proclamation, of the New Testament was necessary for Christian faith, not any particular facts regarding the historical Jesus.

Finally, Marcus Borg (1942-2015) was an American New Testament scholar, theologian and author. He was among the most widely known and influential voices in progressive Christianity. As a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, Borg was a major figure in historical Jesus scholarship. The Jesus Seminar was a group of about 150 critical Biblical scholars and laymen founded in 1985. Members of the Seminar used votes with colored beads to decide their collective view of the historicity of the deeds and sayings of Jesus of Nazareth. They published their results in three reports: The Five Gospels (1993), The Acts of Jesus (1998), and The Gospel of Jesus (1999).

As Friedrich Schleiermacher argued that while we cannot know God in a scientific way, humans have a sense and taste for the infinite, no one can know Progressive Christianity from these four short articles. However, I hope you now have a sense and taste for what we are about. If you would like to learn more, join us at United Christian Church, Levittown.

Sources: Wikipedia and Jewish Virtual Librar

Keith A. Pacheco, Langhorne, is an aspiring peacemaker and a student of nonviolent communication.

Excerpt from:
On religion: Being aware of our connectivity to God and each other - The Intelligencer

The philosopher William James was one of the turn of the centurys greatest examiners of the religious experience, noting its varieties and studying its phenomena, albeit with the kind of distanced, unheated air characteristic of an academician of that era. But the psychologist Carl Jung was the thinker who intellectually legitimized the religious impulse as a constituent part of the human species.

Jung said that a fundamental part of life is an intense desire to know the divine, a yearning to experience that which is larger than the self. For modern man, a loss of the religious center resulted in all kinds of maladieselevated concerns to realize ambitions, inordinate delight over material possessions, anxiety over the retention of passing beauty, strength, grace, etc. Caretaking of the soul was a remedy for these things, though for modern man an acceptance of that fact proved difficult. Hence, neurosis.

Its not surprising that a being with so limited a life span and skill set, but with such unlimited imagination and intuition, would look up from his stone ax at some point and stare out into the horizon. The earliest evidence of worship seems to stretch back even as far as the Paleolithic, when burial rituals provided food and weapons for a type of transcendence for the deceased.

Adopting a burial itself, rather than abandonment, makes no sense except as a religious practice, if it was ever more than that at all. There might be modern hygienic reasons for caretaking of corpses, but that would unlikely have been a concern of ancient peoples, and even so there are easier ways to rid oneself of pestilent nuisances than burying them.

So there must have been some early concept of a spirit, one that could dissociate itself from the physical body. The idea of another life into which that spirit passedwhether or not it was conceived as eternalwas at least something that was in play from earliest history.

But contemporaneously with that concept is evidence of a totemism of some type, involving hybrid creatures, half-man and half-animal, as depicted on cave walls. So not only did the early worshipers have one of the essential notions of any religiontranscendence, as expressed through passagebut they also had anotherthe notion of a deity (atonement, another definitive notion, could be equally as old, depending on the reason sacrifices and scapegoating were practiced: as a means to appease the gods for sin, or as a means to flatter the gods for favors).

Eons passed, and the gods became plenteous. No longer was the bulbous-figured fertility goddess with enormous breasts the only shape that the divine took. Gods of all kinds appeared, and for all purposes. Gods associated with the cycles of life, with the passage of time, with joy and pleasure, and with fear and loathing, sprang forth to claim their due. And these gods claimed that due in the form of statuary and other means of depiction, which required obeisance. The gods couldnt very well remain out in the cold and heat, so they were given houses, or temples, and at that point mankind was at a place very near the place we currently possess.

The point of all this is to say that one aspect of the religious impulse Jung spoke of is the theophanic desirethe need for the god to manifest. Its not enough for the gods to have names and functions; they have to have faces. After all, we are sentient beings and ultimately cannot be contented with things that remain purely ghostly.

One of the telling features of our times is that the religious impulse in the first world has been transitioned, or transferred, to causese.g., the identification with certain political and environmental stances. In the first world, the vestiges of orthodox worship of a deity remain, of course, but more and more the majority of people profess a spirituality rather than a religiosity, one that rids itself of the traditional aspects that are at odds with the secular episteme.

So God has lost his face and bodyhas un-manifested, as it were. Now, god is often meant, if not written, with a little g, and is accompanied by a superfluity of pronouns to cover all bases. Its fair to say that the old practice of pantheism has returned, the finding of the godlike in all thingsparticularly seas and trees and bees, etc.with its attendant rituals of ecological adoration and stewardship.

But from the purely anthropological standpoint, I dont think it will last. Theres too much history that says otherwise. Witness New Zealands recent bestowal ofpersonhood upon the Whanganui River, the third largest in the country. Its importance to the natives is ancient, but this is the first time that a natural feature has been given equivalent rights with human beings.

Where it gets really interesting is the fact that the river will have guardians, who will for all intents and purposes enjoy the rights of the Whanganui and enforce obligations owed to it. They will, in a legal sense,bethe river when the river needs to leave its ancient banks, put on a suit, and go to the bank or to court.

Poseidon became the manifestation of the Sea, Aphrodite of Love, Artemis of the Hunt, and on and on. Whether they sprang from sea foam or erupted from a volcano, the gods eventually took a shape. And once they had, they expected and received their due from their disciples.

Is such obeisance really distinguishable from the recent theophany of the Whanganui, and the many gods that will doubtless join her/him/it in due timeEverest, Amazon, Eriewith their claims upon our consciences?

Considering the world we live in now, whos willing to bet against this happening? We may have phones and jets, but one wonders how fundamentally different we are from our forebears when it comes right down to things such as these. A.G. Harmon teaches Shakespeare, Law and Literature, Jurisprudence, and Writing at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. His novel, A House All Stilled, won the 2001 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel.

Above image by Miguel Virkkunen Carvalho, used with permission under a Creative Commons License.

Continued here:
New Names for Old Gods - Patheos (blog)

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A follow up I wrote to Pantheism, a collection of quotes I shared part 1 widely and quickly realized that what I had meant as a simple introduction to the philosophy seemed to create at least as many questions as it attempted to answer. I submit part 2 as an attempt to elaborate on somemore

Agnostic doubter

Scientific pantheism: Revering the Universe,Caring for Nature, Learning from Science, Promoting Human and Animal Rights, Celebrating Life. Reason plus passion. 100% strong naturalist. http://www.pantheism.net - http://www.facebook.com/Pantheism

Author, artist, vegan, philosopher, poet, friend. Nostalgic, sentimental, complex and passionate. I write, draw, paint and sculpt when inspired. Love travel, hiking, good movies, good food, good music, animals, nature and the outdoors. Mythology, history, science, biology, psychology and metaphysics are of particular interest... that and anything horror, sci-fi or fantasy related.

Science and experience teaches us that everything is connected... so intimately connected that in describing reality, words lose their meaning. And all I feel about all that is a sense of awe at this grand and amazing divine universe.

Admin. A lover of Science, Nature, and our amazing play. On a quest to soak up being HERE, in all its beauty and pain.

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When asked my religion I kindly say, "I have my own way of beliefs." Mainly due to the fact not many people understand what I try to say when I say there is a little truth in each religion but I do not fallow any specific one.

Want to learn more

Vedantist

Ontologically I favor the idea that existence encompasses all possibilities.

All one, all God!

I am a scientis and a professor of Environmental Science. I am an adopted son of an Assiniboine family, and a Sundancer. My philosophy shares a great deal with Pantheism. There is an element of sympatico that I would like to explore further.

To be honest I have never heard of pantheism before but would love to learn. I don't believe in a god, at least not a heavenly father that created everything and everyone, a being that people pray to and worship. I do believe everything is energy. When we die our energy returns to the earth, sky and space. I 'm looking for like minded people. If you think I'd fit in, learn and contribute to the group, I would love to be added.

We are all one. I try to remember this as I go about my life, in this seemingly mad world.

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"It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together" - Ben Kenobi

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BERLIN/LONDON In her early 20s, Kristiane Baker was having the time of her life. She was living her dream as a presenter for MTV Europe, brushing shoulders with celebrities like Mick Jagger and Bono on a regular basis and getting paid to do it. From the outside, it was everything she had ever hoped for. But on the inside, she sometimes felt a crushing sense of depression and anxiety that she couldnt shake.

And then she met Imran Khan, the famous Pakistani cricketer who through music would lead her to Islam and a new sense of inner peace.

He was my introduction to Islam, she said of Khan. I like to say I wasnt looking, I was found.

As a German growing up in Hamburg,Backer had always been passionate about the arts, so when she heard a qawwali, the devotional form of music often associated with Sufi Islam, during a trip to Pakistan to visit Khan, it was no surprise that she was intrigued and moved by its beauty. What was different this time though, was the depth she experienced with every note. Each lyric seemed connected to a higher form of love that could not be felt between humans.

Beyond the music, Backer said she was very much touched by the humanity of the people, by the hospitality, by the warmth, in Pakistan. Everyone she came across, no matter what their financial situation, was willing to donate funds to Khans charity project, a cancer hospital in Lahore.

We met people who were very poor in the mountains, in the northern areas of Pakistan, who welcomed us with generosity, she said. Men in rags with teeth missing dropped a few rupees into Imrans hands for the hospital. Women took off their jewelry and donated it for the hospital.

Backer was in awe. She was taken aback by the stark difference between the attitudes she experienced in the entertainment industry life, especially the superficiality of Western pop music, and the spirituality she witnessed in Pakistan.

It would be three years before she finally converted to Islam, but the trip had struck a chord.

Backer began researching about Islam, spending many days with Khan constantly exposed to his religion and way of life. This, she would later admit, helped her to spiritually awaken and discover a way of life that she could truly identify with.

I read a lot of books, and what I discovered was mind-blowing, she said. It was like a whole new universe. I was intrigued from the first book I read, and I wanted to know more. I realized there is one God ... and that were self-responsible for our own deeds and [that] babies are born pure, not as sinners. ...I also learned how verses from the Quran can help me in my daily life.

Backer was inspired by it all.

I was convinced, she continued. I converted because I wanted to bring God into my life, and I wanted to purify myself to taste the spiritual fruits I was reading about.

But just as Backers interest in Islam was growing, something in her life shifted again. Khan, the man she had hoped to marry, abruptly ended their relationship and married another woman.

At that point, Backer no longer had a direct reason to understand Islam. If she had recoiled against Khan and his religion, it would have been understandable. Instead, she embraced the faith without skipping a beat and converted.

Islam provided Backer with the solace and strength to remain dignified throughout Khans instant and very public marriage to another woman. What began as a journey of discovery prompted by love for a man became a discovery of eternal love for someone else: God.

It was her newly adopted faith that helped Backer reconcile life in a glitzy pop icon world where she had previously felt unsure of her place and find meaning in European culture.There were no more clouds in her life; the confusion and inner conflict had lifted.

Backer, now 51,is one of the most well-known German converts to Islam. But sadly, her conversion was not well-received by everyone at home.

When it became known that I am a Muslim, a very negative press campaign followed, Backer said. I was an award-winning TV presenter, a popular icon over there for over seven years, and suddenly I was accused of being a supporter of terrorism. The papers suggested I had lost the plot. Soon after, I was sacked from all my TV programs and practically lost my entertainment career in Germany.

This reaction had surprised Backer, because while she did enjoy an increased sense of modesty in her Muslim life, she had never associated Islam with the compulsion to wear burqas or found the stereotype of repression of women in the religion to ring true in her personal experience.

The first thing I changed was my sense of dress a little bit, she said. I ditched the miniskirts I felt more feminine Who needs those whistles on the streets?

I was working in this industry where the motto was: If youve got it flaunt it,'" she continued.And now [I was] suddenly learning about the concept of modesty. You know, how its actually more dignified for a woman to cover her assets and not show them to everybody.

But others didnt seem to understand her abrupt identity change. She found the double standard towards Muslim women confusing.

Its fine if you show your tummy and have a piercing in your tummy and wear miniskirts, but its not fine to wear long clothes and a headscarf? Thats wrong.

Her parents also held these unfair perceptions of Islam, and though they loved her in spite of her conversion, they struggled to move beyond them.

Courtesy of Kristiane Backer

They had some serious prejudices against Islam and especially Muslim men prejudices that Imrans way of ending our relationship had only confirmed, Backer recalled. I tried to explain to them that I had discovered the religion for myself and had made it my own. Imran had merely opened the door for me My father even mentioned the word pantheism in his view, Muslims wanted to take over the whole world. He eventually asked me to stop talking about Islam and from then on, the topic became taboo in the house.

The reactions frustrate her to this day. In Backers experience, German identity is not all that different from Islamic identity, so why should she have to choose between the two?

Being German, she said, doesnt mean drinking beer and being nationalistic. I wholeheartedly believe and know that Islamic values are compatible not only with German values, [but] with European values generally. Islam is a religion for all times and all worlds and therefore also for Europeans in our day and age. Im living proof.

And the Germans before her were proof as well, Backer said. In embracing Islam and Eastern culture, she was merely following in the footsteps of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Martin Heideggerand Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller German thinkers who were influenced by Eastern and Islamic texts, includingthose by Persian poets Jalaluddin Rumi and Hafez.

But Backers own convictions couldnt change the perceptions at home, and she found many German doors closed on her. She decided to relocate permanently to London, where she had converted, and continued working as a broadcaster.

In England, Backer found a much different reception to her adopted religious identity. Despite continued Islamophobia across Europe, the United Kingdom had a more established group of Muslims working across the country. This was largely due to the fact that a number of Muslims in England had often come to the country for educational and intellectual pursuits, whereas those entering Germany historically came as guest workers, she said.

But life as a Muslim here isnt entirely easy, especially as a convert. There is a sense of community among Muslims in general, Backer said, which makes the climate for converts in particular quite lonely.

We are a minority within the minority. Where do we pray? Which mosque do we go to, the Pakistani, the Persian or the Turkish mosque?

Instead of feeling included in one of those ethnic groups, converts sometimes find themselves pushed aside for not being Muslim enough, or regarded as trophies that other Muslims flaunt around at parties and events, with little regard for the person themselves, she said.

For Backer, the lack of acceptance from her family, as well as the sense of rejection from within the Muslim community, is one of the reasons she is determined to maintain her role as a prominent Muslim TV presenter in England a career path that she thinks will help change perceptions of Islam in the West.

Do your job whatever you do really well so people admire you, is the advice she gives Muslims struggling to assimilate in Western society today. Remember [that] whatever you do, you are not only a servant of God, but also an ambassador of Islam, she said.

But Backer knows that Muslims doing good in their own communities can only go so far, so as a member of the media, she constantly advocates for stronger and more accurate representations of Muslims in pop culture.

Courtesy of Kristiane Backer

Nowadays, she said in light of the disproportional and often Islamophobic coverage of terrorist acts, Muslims need to compensate for the news coverage in other sections of the media, to make documentaries on Muslim culture and have Muslims characters featured on soap operas.

This need for a more accurate representation of Islam and Muslims is why she published a book about her journey to the faith. WithFrom MTV to Mecca: How Islam Inspired My Life, Backeraspires to show Europeans that outside of the terror and suppression they see on the news, the majority of Muslims are in fact normal, wholesome and productive members of their society.

And she has already seen results. In her newfound role as a spokesperson for Islam in Europe, shes noticed some attitudes in Germany toward her greatly improving.

Yet the future of Islam rests on the youth in the community, not her, Backer said. Young Muslims, she stressed, must teach the world that Islam is a modern religion and show people that its not something backward or incompatible with the West.

Islam here in Europe is a little fossilized, and it is up to the young people to take this forward and to really look into the sources of Islam, study the religion thoroughly through contemporary and classical scholars. And then educate not only the mainstream society, but even their own parents, because I tell you, Im always so shocked when I hear young Muslims here are losing their faith.

Ultimately, Backer said, its about making others understand the faith and closing the empathy gap, like Imran Khan did with her all those years ago in Pakistan.

Its befriending other people; its reaching out, she said. That is how I became a Muslim. Because I was touched by the generosity and friendship and the wonderful manners of the Muslims who I met.

Her parting advice to Western Muslims, convert and otherwise?:Never retreat just in your own Muslim bubble Mix with mainstream society.

If professional Muslims in the Westsuddenly roll up their prayer mat in their offices and step away to pray or fast on Ramadan, colleagues will be exposed to Islam, she said. And [this is how they] will understand it better.

After all, Backer said: The beautiful values of Islam and the teaching[s] of our noble Prophet [Muhammad] are [some] of the best-kept secrets in the West. ... [Its] time we lift that veil.

Courtesy of Kristiane Backer

This Ramadan has been an especially trying month for Muslims. Long summer days without food or water have been made all the more challenging given such tragedies as the attack on a mosque in London, the heartbreaking story of young Nabra in Virginia, who was on her way to the mosque to start her fast when she was bashed to death with a baseball bat, and the numerous attacks on innocent civilians in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other countries in the Muslim world. The only antidote to the despair brought on by such suffering and violence is the message of Ramadan a message of compassion, of unity and of spiritual connection to our fellow human beings and to God.

I hope that the stories in this series of Western Muslim converts reveal how every individual is constantly seeking spiritual fulfillment. In our case, these individuals have found their spiritual home and solace. I pray that the readers of this series, in their own way, through their own traditions, also find the spiritual solace they are seeking.

Although the month of fasting has come to an end, we need more than ever to keep the message of Ramadan alive. Muslims across the world are marking the end of this holy month this weekend with the festival of Eid al-Fitr and a message of Eid Mubarak. So to all of you, Muslim and non-Muslim, I wish to extend these greetings of compassion and unity to you as we end our series. Eid Mubarak!

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This Former MTV Icon Found Inner Peace Through Islam - HuffPost

In order to understand the origin and doctrine of the so-called Gnostic gospels, written between the 2nd and 4th centuries and found in Nag Hammadi (Egypt), we first need to be introduced briefly to the movement that was behind them, and thus understand why Christians rejected these texts and how they have no connection with the historical Jesus.

Gnosticism (gnosis = knowledge [in Greek]) is a pre-Christian spiritual movement born of a syncretistic combination of elements of Iranian religion with other Mesopotamian traditions, ideas from Greek philosophical schools such as Platonism and Pythagoreanism, and the Jewish apocalyptic tradition. It bursts onto the public stage in the mid-2nd century as a powerful trend, coming to be represented by many teachers and various schools, and enjoying ample growth (Palestine, Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Italy and Gaul) (Garca Bazn).

It is characterized by seeking salvation through knowledge reserved for a chosen few, and by a distinct cosmological and anthropological dualism. The knowledge they were seeking was not intellectual, but spiritual and intuitivenamely, the discovery of divine nature itself: eternal, hidden, and imprisoned in the body and the psyche. This knowledge was reserved for an elite group of spiritual men.

When it came into contact with Christianity, Gnosticism gave rise to a long list of sects that mixed Gnostic and Christian elements, confusing the early Christian communities. Ancient Gnosticism, while not homogeneous in all its teachings, generally had significant contempt for the material world and for the body.

Gnostics believed that the material world in which we live is a cosmic catastrophe, and that, in some way or another, sparks of divinity have fallen into and been trapped in matter, from whence they need to escape and return to their source. They escape from matter when they gain full consciousness of their situation and their divine origin. This knowledge is called gnosis.

Therefore, the only way to achieve salvation is not by Gods action, but by acquiring personal awareness of having that divine spark in oneself. Many of these doctrines take the form of self-salvation, self-divinization, or reincarnation, with a touch of pantheism, and they see Jesus and Christ as two separate realities. These ideas appear again in New Age movements such as Conny Mendezs Christian Metaphysics, the Ishayas, and modern Gnostic and esoteric sects.

It is important to emphasize that Gnostic beliefs are strongly anti-Christian and deny the central beliefs of Christianity: the Incarnation of the Word, and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Their vision of the world is, furthermore, pessimistic.

Thanks to the testimony of many Christian writings against Gnostics, we know a great deal about their beliefs. The dogmas proclaimed by early Christianity were established in order to save the original faith from contamination by the Gnostic ideas that began to proliferate in the Hellenistic world and within the Roman Empire from the 2nd to the 5th centuries.

It is not true that Gnosticism was a marginal form of Christianity, as various writers of the esoteric world often affirm; rather, the two were separate and mutually deprecating. Not only did Christians reject the Gnostics for distorting the message and life of Jesus with oriental doctrines and strange philosophies; the Gnostics also rejected and attacked orthodox Christians, because the Gnostics viewed them as spiritually inferior beings.

The attacks were mutual, but Gnosticism, due to its syncretistic nature that mixed together elements of any religion, assimilated aspects of Christianity into its teachings, and gave the impression of being a tolerant religion. This is easy to see by reading the mutual doctrinal attacks from that period.

Historian Paul Johnson writes the following in this regard: Gnostic groups adopted fragments of Christianity, but they tended to separate these elements from their historical origins. They were Hellenizing them, in the same way that they Hellenized other oriental cults (often amalgamating the results). Paul fought with all his strength against Gnosticism, since he realized that it could devour Christianity and destroy it. In Corinth, he met educated Christians who had reduced Jesus to a myth. Among the Colossians, he discovered Christians who adored intermediate spirits and angels. It was difficult to combat Gnosticism because, like the hydra, it had many heads, and was always changing. Of course, all the sects had their own codes, and they generally hated each other. Some conflated Platos cosmogony with the story of Adam and Eve, and they interpreted it in different ways; thus, the Ophites venerated serpents and cursed Jesus in their liturgy

Some authors have written that Christian dogmas changed the doctrine of early Christianity, but that is not true. Christian dogmas do not introduce any doctrinal novelty; rather, they formulate the faith clearly and explicitly in a precise theological language, so as to free it from ambiguous expressions and arbitrary interpretations that could distance it from the faith of the apostles.

Dogmas came to the aid of the faithful so that they could avoid being confused by new doctrines that were foreign to the Gospel. In a way, those Gnostic currents of thought are promulgated anew today in teachings such as those spread by the New Age movement, the Urantia Book, Sixto Paz with his books like cosmic soap operas, J.J. Bentez with his The Trojan Horse series, the followers of The DaVinci Code, and other supposed new revelations by extraterrestrials regarding Jesus. They present their fantasies as the hidden, secret, apocryphal version of history.

In times of cultural crisis, new forms of Gnosticism awaken from the depths of history with their illusions, their multicolored games, and their contortions, and they lavish their ideas on a vast public hungry for spiritual secrets and exotic mysticism. Its important to clarify that todays Gnostic movements and Gnostic churches have no historical continuity with ancient Gnosticism; rather, they are modern-day re-packagings or reinventions using elements similar to ancient forms of Gnosticism, but with ever-changing new traits in accordance with each new socio-cultural and religious context.

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Who were the authors of the so-called Gnostic gospels, and what did they believe? - Aleteia EN