Philip Goff, on whom I have written elsewhere, has an article in Aeon explaining why he has 'taken a leap across the chasm', towards a heretical form of Christianity. The problem here is that a Christian ought to believe that his Faith is a gratuitous gift of his personal Lord God and Savior. It would be sad if the Lord gave us Faith in a wrong dogma unless that was what we had deserved.
Despite rejecting religion,
he found Catholicism boring and rather unfair to Gay people. But this was a matter of 'economia' or the management of the Church. The leaders of the Church had to find a suave, discretionary, way in which to keep disparate communities of Catholics with very different material life-styles and mores sufficiently cohesive and united to fulfill the functions of an organized religion. One might criticize or reject the way an enterprise is managed without denying there is a need for the services it provides.
I always had a spiritual sense, a sense of a greater reality at the core of things, what William James called ‘The More’. But I would connect to ‘The More’ in my own way, through meditation and engagement with nature. In other words, I was a signed-up member of the ‘spiritual but not religious’ grouping.
Nothing wrong in that at all. You could say 'if there is an almighty God, it seems He has not chosen to give me the gift of Faith. Still, I am thankful for the spiritual and moral benefits I receive from meditation and the contemplation of nature.
And thus I remained for a couple of decades. I was happy in this club. There was no ‘God-shaped hole’ in my life. But, more recently, a few things have changed. The first was intellectual. Most of my fellow philosophers are persuaded either by the arguments for the very traditional idea of God, or by the case for Richard Dawkins-style atheism. I’ve come to think that both sides of this debate have something right.
Is organized religion, all things considered, evil or a source for good? One answer, that given by Jefferson, was that Religion may be a good thing in our personal, but not our corporate or political life. In matters of Religion 'divided we stand. United we fall'. Let various sects proliferate in the same manner that various sorts of private enterprise compete with each other.
In terms of the case for atheism, I remain as convinced as ever that the suffering we find in the universe is powerful evidence against the existence of a loving and all-powerful God.
This assumes there is no eternity of bliss for those who suffer horribly on earth, yet keep the Faith.
But I’ve also come to think there are powerful considerations in support of something Godish.
But this would be irrelevant unless this Godish being can grant us perfect felicity in an eternal after-life. Also, we'd like it if He performed a miracle so as to prolong the life of our loved ones.
One is the fine-tuning of physics for life, the surprising discovery of recent decades that certain numbers in physics are, against incredible odds, just right for the emergence of life.
But this could mean that life is simply parasitic and arose without any design or forethought.
The second is psycho-physical harmony, the improbable alignment between consciousness and behaviour that is presupposed in any evolutionary story of the character of our conscious experience.
But this 'harmony' may be an illusion. It could be like the felicity of a gambler on a lucky streak which is bound to end sooner or later. Currently, he feels on top of the world. But there will be tears before bedtime.
All this was laid out in my recent book Why? The Purpose of the Universe (2023).
The orthodox view was that all entities have 'conatus'- i.e. an inertial drive to remain what they are. Life's purpose is to go on living or, at least, to leave descendants or kin of some sort. Richard Dawkin's notion of the 'extended phenotype' is that there are genes within us which work for the spread of genes in other bodies from, it may be, other species. But this is merely to repeat the notion that 'telos' is 'conatus'- purpose is self-preservation.
I now think the evidence points towards a hypothesis that John Stuart Mill took seriously: a good God of limited abilities.
Whose Church would not be able to compete with other Churches which have an excellent God with unlimited abilities. Also if there is such a God, He will soon be displaced by a more powerful deity. Indeed, this was the old view. The Gods of the pagans had very limited power whereas the God of Abraham was All-Powerful. Indeed, he was the sole efficient cause of everything that exists. With the Bhagvad Gita, a similar 'occasionalist' theism prevailed in Hinduism.
This hypothesis is able to account both for the imperfections of our universe – in terms of God’s limited abilities – and for the things about our universe that are improbably good, such as fine-tuning and psycho-physical harmony.
But, why did that 'fine-tuning' only generate life- so far as we know- on one insignificant planet in a vast universe? Currently we believe that earth-like planets can't have existed till enough heavy elements were formed. So there was a vast period of time during which no life (as we understand it) was possible.
God would have liked to make intelligent life in an instant, or by breathing into the dust as we see depicted in Genesis. But the only way God was able to create life was by bringing into existence a universe with the right physics that would eventually evolve intelligent life. God made the best universe they could.
But there may be superior Gods who made superior universes. Who is to say those Gods might not be able to take us- perhaps after we have shed our gross physical form- to a really nice universe?
The second change was discovering the great diversity of forms of Christianity.
That diversity was greater closer to the times of Lord Jesus Christ himself. Smaller sects were absorbed by larger sects. Interestingly, 'occasionalism' triumphed in the Christianity of Descartes and Liebniz just as it had done in the Islam of Ghazzali or the Hinduism of the Bhagvad Gita.
Wide reading and conversations with various Christian thinkers have given me a deeper sense of the mystical traditions of Christianity, as well as its radical roots. I haven’t changed my mind on the form of Christianity I rejected in my youth. However, I now think there are forms of Christianity that fit quite well with the limited God I now believe in.
Why did those forms of Christianity decline? The answer is, if you have the choice between worshipping a weak God and one who is all powerful, you choose the latter. St. Anselm's ontological proof says that it is more perfect for an all powerful God to exist than to have a less powerful God or an all powerful God who is merely a figment of our imagination. In our own age, Godel revived this argument. The Catholic Church, however, has clarified that it is founded on the mystery of Faith- not some particular type of reasoning.
The final change was coming to see the value of a spiritual community.
Why not join the biggest such community which is likely to be the one with an all-powerful God who, no matter what happens to us on Earth, can give us an eternal reward? True, there is the problem that you may have to shun certain very nice people- e.g. that son of yours who turned out to be Gay- but, no doubt, in Heaven you will meet them again because, being sensible, they are bound to renounce their sins in articulo mortis. I think the Mormons have a scheme whereby they baptize everyone who has ever lived so that all gain the Mormon paradise.
Being ‘spiritual but not religious’ can be a bit lonely and hard to sustain. Religion involves rituals and practices that bind people together across space and time, marking the seasons and the big moments of life – birth, marriage, coming of age, death – forming a bridge between society and the Divine. I feel happier and closer to the Divine when I can connect to it in relation to others.
You will be in such a relation to hundreds of millions more such people if you re-join the Catholic Church rather than become, say, a Unitarian.
The idea of God I received as a child was of something completely separate from the universe. However, there are versions of the God hypothesis that don’t see things in such binary terms. There are pantheists, who think that ‘God’ and ‘the universe’ are simply different words for the same thing. This seems like just atheism repackaged. But there are also pan-en-theists, who don’t quite identify God and the universe, but nor do they think they’re entirely separate. Panentheists believe there is an intimate connection between God and the universe; the two overlap. The universe is in some sense inside God, and perhaps God is inside the universe.
The problem here is that what can be said of God (parmatma in Hinduism) can also be said of the soul (atma which is self-identical to parmatma). This gives rise to the nuisance of the Hindu Godman.
These ideas of the Divine resonate with me spiritually, in a way that the purely supernatural idea of God does not.
You could embrace a notion of 'theosis' or becoming God. This is like the spiritual practices of the Hindu Advaitin or the Sufi Pir who affirms 'tawhid' or non-Duality. Indeed, the Russian Orthodox church even had a notion of onomatodoxy whereby the name of God was greater than God. Perhaps, some mystical practice- e.g. hesychasm- might lift you up to that exalted state.
There is a fit with the conviction of many mystics, as well as the English Romantic poets, that the Divine is present in all things. William Wordsworth spoke in the poem Tintern Abbey (1798) of ‘Something far more deeply interfused.’
Indeed. One consequence of such thinking was that more and more middle class people came to feel that the working class and the peasantry should have equal educational opportunities. Indeed, so should African origin slaves and benighted Hindooos and other such heathens. Previously, there was the notion that most people were little better than two legged donkeys who must dig ditches so that those with inherited wealth could pursue a more refined and philosophical existence. If God is both all-powerful and is 'interfused' in the bodies of even women and workers and the laboring people of distant lands, then Humanity had a far brighter and more capacious horizon.
Moreover, there is a close fit with the philosophical theory I have spent much of my career defending, namely panpsychism: the view that consciousness goes all the way to the fundamental building blocks of reality.
What is equally likely is that consciousness is an illusion. For the last few centuries, we have had a 'lucky streak' in terms of plucking 'low lying' scientific and mathematical fruit. Currently, some even believe that we can live forever or create nicer universes for ourselves. But our lucky streak may be coming to an end. New scientific discoveries may show that we are unlikely to escape our own Solar system or that, even if we did, there would be nowhere to go in a Universe where we were a unique but inconsequential parasite whose days can already be numbered.
For panpsychists, the particles or fields that make up our universe have their own very rudimentary form of conscious experience, and the highly complex consciousness of the human or animal brain is built up from these more basic forms of consciousness.
But if 'consciousness' discovers its own limits and essentially parasitic and contingent nature, we might envy the mute choir of stars who decided that providing the music of the spheres just wasn't worth it. They gave themselves lobotomies or just declined into imbecility or catatonia. A life which, if properly examined, isn't worth living may not end but might be endured in a state of sullen torpor.
Panentheism is more at home in a panpsychist picture of reality, as it’s easier to make sense of the Divine pervading the universe if the universe is filled with consciousness than it is if the universe is a cold, unfeeling mechanism.
There may indeed be a Liebnizian monadology or 'Indra's net of pearls'. But what if it is one featuring only boredom and defeated hopes?
Panentheism may also help us to make sense of the idea of a God that is subject to limitations. If God had to create the universe inside themselves, then it could be that the timeless and unchangeable nature of God imposed certain limitations on what could be created. Perhaps the deep simplicity and unity of God’s nature ensured that creation had to begin with a very simple starting point – the Big Bang – and could only progress to complexity over time.
But that 'complexity' might discover its own destiny is defeat and depression.
In my book Why? I defended such views of our origins over both traditional atheism and traditional Western religions. What’s happened since then is that I’ve come to see that panentheism fits quite well with certain interpretations of Christianity.
The problem here is that it may be found to fit better with Russian orthodoxy or some crazy Rasputin's version of it. Ultimately, we do have to look at the social utility of different religions available to us. Catholics have good schools and, in America, they provide the brains for Conservative politics while the Evangelicals provide the brawn. I recall, as a kid thinking 'Chairman' Bill Buckley was a pretentious cretin. I did not foresee the rise and rise of American Catholicism or that a guy like J.D. Vance (whose wife is Hindu) would convert to that religion. Back in the Seventies, we thought of Catholicism as appealing to lower IQ, blue-collar, bigots. But their Schools and Universities tended to get better over time. It's worth going to Church if this ensures your kids get into a better school. However, it is important that every child's behind is left alone.
Many people assume the essence of Christianity is as follows. We are all sinners and so we deserve to burn in hell for eternity. Fortunately, Jesus took the punishment we deserve and, as a result, if we accept Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf, we’ll go to heaven to live with God when we die. Everyone who doesn’t accept Jesus’ sacrifice will burn in hell forever.
Interestingly, the Gita shows something similar. Krishna promises to take on our own sins. His theophany is actually a 'self-slaying' because if you utter even the most condign praise of your self, you are said to be killing yourself. Krishna explains this at a later point in the Mahabharata.
More generally, there was always the notion of the 'korban' or 'pharmakos'- i.e. the scapegoat whose killing carries away the sins of the community. Socrates reveals he is himself that 'pharmakos'.
In fact, this is only one interpretation of Christianity, associated with the Protestant Reformation, although a similar view was defended by Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century.
No. Augustinianism had prevailed. You may be baptized and you may live a life of sanctity. But God may have predestined you to Hell fire. It was believed that the Protestant work-ethic was motivated by this fear. People worked harder because they were haunted by the knowledge that no matter what they did, they may not be of the 'elect'. Catholicism was freer of this gloomy view of things.
It’s also, in my opinion, one of the most implausible theological doctrines in any of the modern global religions.
Islam holds this view and is doing very well indeed. Back in the Seventies, intellectuals thought it was bound to decline. Hafizullah Amin who became infected with a particularly stupid strain of Marxism while studying, on a US scholarship, in Wisconsin and Columbia, returned to Afghanistan to launch the Khalqi Communist revolution which was so extreme that the Soviet Union had to intervene to restore the more moderate 'Parchami' wing of the Communist party. Thus began Afghanistan's decades of agony. Compared to even the more moderate 'Secular Socialists' like Saddam or the Assads in Syria, Fundamentalist Islam seems preferable.
I don’t think anybody deserves to burn in hell for eternity. And, even if we did, it wouldn’t achieve anything to punish an innocent man in our place. The word ‘Jesus’ is for many deeply associated with this picture,
But Jesus came back to life and, in 40 days, performed so many miracles that if they were all written down in a book, that book would be vaster than the Universe. True, the crucifixion was very painful but some women go through worse during child-birth. Indeed Julia of Norwich spoke of 'Mother Jesus' nailed to the Cross, giving birth to the world.
and so, in discussing an alternative, I’m going to borrow a trick from the author Francis Spufford and use the Hebrew version of Jesus instead: Yeshua.
In which case, this is a story about a Rabbi who believed the end of days was nigh and he himself was the Messiah. But, this would mean that the Church of St.James (which survived in South India and was composed of Jews who converted to Christianity and who kept other Christians at arms length) is the true Church. St. Paul went in the wrong direction.
Christianity is a little bit like quantum mechanics. In terms of the mathematics, quantum mechanics is our most successful scientific theory. The problem is nobody knows what on earth is going on in reality to make those equations work in predicting what we will observe.
But, unlike Christianity, QMT isn't founded on a mystery. The difficulty is that all we can have is a 'phenomenology' until someone comes up with testable differences between theories- e.g. of quantum gravity. But we believe this will happen sooner or later. I suppose, Christians too may say 'well, sooner or later, the 'Rapture' will occur. At that point, all you atheists and heathens will have proof positive of our dogma. But it will be too late for you.'
There are many different interpretations with no consensus on which is the correct one. Likewise, with Christianity, all Christians agree that Yeshua had some central role in the purpose of the universe. But there is no officially agreed view on the mechanics of that.
Either you believe in the Eschaton- i.e. the end of days- and say God's 'mysterious economy' (management) is the source of the Katechon which keeps the Eschaton at bay. Why this happens is not vouchsafed to us. But be sure a generation will come which will witness the events described in the last chapter of the Holy Bible.
The views that are more plausible to my mind revolve around love and unity rather than sin and punishment. According to the participatory theory popular in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Yeshua stuff was all about God becoming more similar to us so that we can become more similar to God.
They hold that baptism is participation in Lord Jesus's death and resurrection.
God wants us to share more deeply in their form of existence. But there’s a problem: the timeless, transcendent aspect of God is radically different from, say, a naturally evolved human being.
who may also have a 'transcendent aspect' which is why the Gospel of John says that Isaiah "saw Jesus' glory and spoke about him."
Without God becoming more similar to their creation, the difference between God and creation is just too great for the two to share a common form of existence. The philosopher Robin Collins suggests this is analogous to the fact that ‘a tree branch cannot be grafted into a horse, only another tree; the horse is too alien for it.’
We can't be sure of this. There may be some way of engineering particular genes so that such grafting could 'take'.
It is only once God, through Yeshua, shares in temporal, physical existence that the gap is bridged between God and creation,
how, then, did Isaiah see Jesus many centuries before he was born? In any case, the Bible says God made us in his image.
creating the potential for human beings and indeed the whole of creation to share more deeply in God’s form of existence.
Which must be the case if the creator makes something in his own image.
This view still doesn’t make sense to me if we’re assuming that God is all-powerful.
We also assume there are 'hidden variables' known only to God or certain perfected beings. In the Quran Sharif there is the story of Prophet Moses accompanying the immortal Al-Khidr. Moses is puzzled because Al-Khidr seems to be harming good and helpful, very poor, people while helping the rich but evil. Al-Khidr explains that the seeming harm was actually providential while the seeming help was to prevent an evil rich man from gaining a certain buried treasure.
If God can do anything, then they could have created us to share in their form of existence from the beginning, rather than subjecting us to millions of painful years of evolution. But if God is not all-powerful, then maybe they are on their way to creating a perfect universe but are only able to do this in two stages. In the first stage, they create an OK universe, one with the right kind of physics to eventually evolve intelligent life. Next, when creation has evolved enough, God begins to bring the universe to perfection by becoming more intimately involved in it, sharing in its nature that it can share in their nature. Perhaps this is a process that is still continuing – and maybe needs a bit of help from us – but which took a radical and decisive step forward in the events surrounding Yeshua.
This makes sense if the Jews were indeed God's chosen people. Sadly, the Jews suffered greatly at the hands of both Christians and Muslims but not Hindus or Confucians. It is difficult to see why God might incarnate as a particular Jew given that He would know that Christianity would become a great scourge for those pious and law-minded people.
Learning about this form of Christianity removed some of my big objections to Christianity.
But the problem of theodicy returns in more acute form. Why would God incarnate as a Jew if this would harm the Jews greatly? I suppose, one could say 'God knew the Jews were evil and capable of Deicide'. But Jews weren't evil. Hitler was. There was a crazy Franco-Greek lady- Gayatri Devi- who decided Hitler was the avatar of Vishnu. Ambassador Serrano, too, embraced this view. He thought Hitler was living in a flying saucer deep under the earth and would return at the appointed time as 'Kalki' the final, destructive, avatar of the Hindu God. My point is that though Catholicism may seem, as James Joyce said 'a rational absurdity', there are far more evil 'irrational absurdities' which could replace it. Let us thank God that Catholicism, by and large, has been a force for the good. Maybe it could have been better but we can agree that it has become better by seeking to make the lives of millions of ordinary people better.
But the resurrection was still a big stumbling block.
Some religions affirm bodily resurrection. It may be that his was originally a Zoroastrian notion. It is also a good reason for Jews to get buried in Jerusalem. Otherwise their bodies will have to tunnel through a lot of earth to get there in time for the Day of Wrath.
If Yeshua rose as a physical body that could be seen and touched, then surely he could have revealed himself to millions, making the existence of God and the truth of Christianity an indisputable historical fact.
Who is to say that the risen Christ, over the course of 40 days, didn't travel back and forth through time to enter the hearts of all those predestined for salvation?
These worries were countered only recently when I read the biblical scholar Dale Allison’s book The Resurrection of Jesus (2021), which presents a powerful defence of a slightly unorthodox view of the resurrection.
Islam and some 'heretical' sects already had the notion that only a phantom suffered on the Cross.
For Allison, the resurrection appearances consisted of visions, rather than literally seeing and touching a body.
Doubting Thomas actually touched that body. He is said to be the apostle of the Indies.
In other words, the resurrection appearances of the first Christians were more like the resurrection appearances of Paul on the road to Damascus.
Though the Bible carefully distinguishes between the two.
We might imagine that, soon after the crucifixion, the followers of Yeshua started being thrown to the ground and overwhelmed by intense visions: first Mary Magdalene, then Peter, later the 11 remaining disciples, 500 people at once, James the brother of Jesus, and many others, much later including Paul. Despite not involving a body that could be physically seen and touched, such novel and intense visions, occurring both to groups and individuals, could be enough to render it undeniable that reality had fundamentally altered in some radically new way.
As far as we know, such shared psychotic disorders occurred during all periods of history.
Crucially, Allison is not denying that the resurrection was physical. He thinks that historical evidence supports the tomb of Yeshua having been found empty. But he denies the familiar narrative we find in Luke’s Gospel according to which Yeshua rose from the tomb as a body that could be seen and touched, hung around for a period of time, and then floated up to heaven – an event known as the ascension. Rather, Allison believes the first Christians identified the resurrection and the ascension.
But they lied about it. There is no 'good news'. The Gospels were just the product of cognitive dissonance- like the belief that Hitler is hiding under the earth in a flying saucer and will return when the time is right.
In Paul’s letters in the Bible, he describes resurrection bodies as continuous with but radically different from ordinary bodies, as a plant is continuous with but radically different from a seed.
In First Corinthians, he says Lord Jesus was the first person to be resurrected in the body. But all bodies will be resurrected. If there is no bodily resurrection, there is no Christian faith.
'When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.' When we die, we are buried with an imperfect human body. When God resurrects us, we have a spiritual body.For Allison, the tomb was empty not because Yeshua had stood up and wandered off, but because he had been transformed into a radically new form of physicality, perhaps a kind of formless energy.
If it was formless, how could he have been recognized? On the other hand it is true that Mary Magdalene originally mistook him for a gardener.
If we move a little beyond what Allison claims and adopt panentheism – on which the universe is part of God – then for this formless energy to be absorbed into God involves this formless energy filling the universe. In other words, Yeshua brought God closer to us not by being punished for our sin but by filling the entire universe with God’s love.
But why him rather than some other dude? What made the Jews so special? To be frank, the Roman yoke was relatively light. Plenty of Jews were already Hellenized and could rise rapidly within the Roman dispensation- e.g. Josephus who had led a rebellion against them.
I suppose, one might reply 'Why not the Jews? They were strategically located and were a sober, industrious, people with a strong indigenous legal system. Still, given the ghastly history of anti-Semitism, Jews might well wish God had chosen some other people.
Do we have any reason to take any of this seriously? Traditional Christian apologists argue that the resurrection is the only explanation for the strange events that followed the crucifixion. We have good historical evidence that many people, including one violent opponent of the Christian movement, had experiences that persuaded them that Yeshua was in some sense alive again. They must have been incredibly powerful experiences because they motivated them to vigorously defend this conviction at great cost to themselves, including the cost of their lives in some cases.
History is replete with rebels or usurpers who claimed to be legitimate King. Pugachev claimed to be Tzar Peter III. I suppose, if he had prevailed, that is what the official Chronicles would have affirmed.
I agree with traditional Christian apologists that there aren’t any very satisfying non-Christian explanations of the historical origins of Christianity.
There are good enough explanations. Hellenized Jews were successful economic migrants over a large territorial expanse. Could they find a creed acceptable to other ethnicities which were similarly influenced by Greek philosophy and literature? If so, they would have a bigger network for 'high trust' transactions such that trade and commerce could burgeon. The Jews were already a law-minded people and if doing business with Jews or Christians who had accepted a Jewish Messiah was safer and more profitable, then there was a purely economic reason for the new sect to burgeon. At a later point, barbarian invasions destroyed the economic foundations for an educated commercial class. Christian institutions may have been able to preserve the classical paideia better and formed a profitable alliance with barbarian Kings. I suppose, if Christianity had not prevailed then some other creed- e.g. Mithraism or Manichaeanism from Iran- would have done so. Roman or Greek religion has been very much an affair of the self-governing Polis which, in some cases, could morph into great Empires. But the 'God-Emperor' had feet of clay. The son of a carpenter seemed preferable.
On the other hand, I agree with the view popularised by Carl Sagan that extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence, and I don’t think we have extraordinary evidence for the resurrection.
Which is why the Church now says that Faith is founded on a Mystery. One may say Religion is 'ontologically dysphoric'. It is not at home in this world. But, there will always be inflexion points in our own lives when we will feel that this world is alien to us. Even if this weren't the case 'Knightian Uncertainty' means it is 'regret minimizing' to have ontologically dysphoric goods and services which can act as 'stores of value' or as 'hedges'. Thus, Economics itself predicts the appearance of organized religions which offer services 'not at home in the world'.
It’s perfectly rational for an atheist to hold that Christianity was sparked by some kind of rare mass hallucination,
or 'noble lie'
preferring that explanation on the basis that, while improbable, mass hallucination is less improbable than a resurrection.
We subscribe to all sorts of 'noble lies' or axioms which are known to be false. This sort of 'artificial reason' or these 'arbitrary shibboleths' can still be very useful.
However, what counts as extraordinary depends on your worldview. I have tried to show how a certain form of Christianity fits quite well with a panentheist view on which God is not all-powerful, a view I believe to be well supported by current evidence.
It can fit quite well with anything at all, if it pays to do so. I personally like Catholicism because it is very good at exorcism. Luther said a good fart will drive away the Devil. Thus a Lutheran exorcism would be very smelly.
Relative to that worldview, Christianity – at least the form I have outlined – is not extraordinary; it’s one possible hypothesis as to what the purpose of the universe might be.
I think its purpose is to provide a setting for Star Wars type adventure movies. Also I think Black Holes are cool.
By accepting that hypothesis, we get a more satisfying explanation of the origins of Christianity than anything available to a non-Christian (although note that the explanation I support, outlined in the previous section, is somewhat different from that of the traditional Christian).
What would be even more satisfying would be praying to Jesus for a Mercedes Benz and then actually getting a Mercedes Benz.
In other words, while the evidence for Christianity is not sufficient to persuade an atheist, it may be sufficient to persuade someone whose worldview is consonant with the truth of Christianity.
Or not. One may say 'I already have a good enough world view. I don't need to go to Church.'
I hasten to add, these matters are inherently uncertain.
No. There is a clear distinction between the Christian 'state of the world' as one where there is bodily resurrection on the day of Wrath, and the belief that there will never be any such thing. Islam and Judaism do have bodily resurrection and Jesus does have a big role in the 'Final Battle' according to the former Religion.
I’ve come to think there’s a reasonable chance that a certain form of Christianity is true; but there’s also a reasonable chance it’s false.
That form is definitely false to orthodox Catholics- though our present Pope might be more open to such views. The danger is that if the Vatican accommodates the Liberals, then the Conservatives may break away. This problem also arises for Anglicanism.
My intellectual hero William James argued that, in situations of uncertainty, when the truth is of monumental importance, in can be rational to choose to believe.
The problem is that such rationality is not categorical- i.e. has no unique model. If it is equally rational to affirm as it is to deny, maybe the proposition involved is 'non-informative'.
He gives the analogy of being stuck in the mountains with the only way of escaping being to leap across an enormous chasm between two precipices. Intellectually speaking, it is uncertain whether or not you can make it. But if you choose to believe you will make it, you raise the chances that you will succeed.
Not in my case. I am shit at jumping. I need to stay put and scream loudly till I am rescued.
The analogy is not perfect, as nobody is suggesting that a religion is more likely to be true if we believe it.
This is a 'Newcomb problem'. Sometimes it is in your interest to actually believe something not consistent with your other beliefs.
But James’s example shows how pragmatic considerations can play a role when the evidence doesn’t conclusively settle matters. To take a contemporary analogy, it’s highly uncertain whether human beings will deal with the climate crisis. But it can be rational to believe we will, if that belief can provide meaning and motivation.
Sometimes it is better to be irrational. There is no need to sugarcoat things by saying 'irrationality is actually rational'.
Faith is not about certainty.
It is nothing unless it is about absolute certainty. Thus if I have faith in my wife and I see her kissing a strange man, I think to myself 'that must be her long lost brother'. I see them having sex, I think 'OMG, my wife has a twin sister who is into really kinky stuff!'
It is fundamentally a decision to trust your spiritual experiences, and to trust a certain framework for interpreting and acting upon those experiences.
If you really have Faith, the question of trust does not arise. There is no evidence which can shake your Faith.
Hindus interpret their spiritual experiences as awareness of Ultimate Reality at the core of one’s being, and respond by meditating to realise their identity with Ultimate Reality.
Some do. Others say 'we don't want omniscience or theosis or liberation from the cycle of rebirth. We want to be reborn as the humble servants of the Lord.' Indeed, about a thousand years ago, Hindus decided that the 'viyogini' (the one suffering because she is separated from her lover) is superior to the Yogi who has achieved union with the Godhead. That's why the Vaishnav complains that Lord Krishna is cruelly refusing to come to His devotee. Unrequited love causes us to focus more intently on the beloved and thus is higher than Union.
Christians interpret their spiritual experiences as awareness of a loving creator, and pray to deepen their relationship with God.
They may do or they may not give the subject any thought. Interpretation is otiose if everything is clear enough.
These decisions to trust certain experiences influence how you see the world, how you respond to other people, and how you engage with nature.
But this may be even truer of the systematic sceptic who doubts everything and thus is able to find better ways to get useful things done.
For a person of faith, each moment of daily life is permeated with meaning and significance.
This may be even truer of the sceptic. It is said that Pyrrho learnt skepticism from Jain 'gymnosophists' in the Punjab.
This openness to uncertainty allows for pluralism.
Sadly, it also allows for stupidity. Cows may be very open to uncertainty.
If faith requires certainty,
Faith is certainty. However, it may be divorced from any empirical observation. You show me a porn video of my wife servicing a whole bunch of dudes. I say 'that's the twin sister of hers of whom she is so ashamed that she denies having any siblings whatsoever.'
then people of faith must be certain that their religion is right, and hence certain that other religions are wrong.
That does not follow. It is obvious to me that the Pope is merely pretending to be an Argentine Catholic. Clearly, he is a Smartha Tambram who is trying to pass himself off as a white dude- probably to win a bet. Also, did you know that my aunty Gowdamma Iyer was the Premier of Israel during the Yom Kippur War? On the other hand, Kamala Harris has no Iyer ancestry. She is clearly an elderly Rabbi.
But for trust to be rational, it’s only required that we’re not putting our trust in something wildly improbable.
No. It is perfectly rational to accept evidence that something wildly improbable- e.g. that a guy named Barrak Hussein Obama could get to be POTUS- actually comes to pass.
If there’s a 30 per cent chance that my loved one will make it, then it’s rational to have faith that they’ll pull through. But if the doctors tell me the chances of survival are sadly less than 1 per cent, then my loved one and I should enjoy our last moments and prepare to say goodbye.
Unless you prefer not to. This has a lot to do with the dynamics of your relationship.
This doesn’t mean faith gets a free pass. If Dawkins is right, there’s less than a 1 per cent chance that God exists, in which case it’s irrational to trust in the tenets of a theistic religion.
Unless you benefit by doing so.
However, if Dawkins is wrong, it might turn out that more than one religion is probable enough to have faith in.
Many believe that all universal religions are 'observationally equivalent'. In Sanskrit we make a distinction between 'matam' (dogma) and 'vigyaan' (science or praxis). We notice that the Saints of Religion pretty much do the same things though their dogmas are different. Still, at some future time we might find that the Christian 'sanyasi' is right. There really is a Day of Wrath and bodily resurrection even for those who were craftily cremated.
I have come to think that Christianity, in a certain form, is a credible possibility.
It exists. That is certain. However, it may be a convenient fiction or 'noble lie' or type of 'Kavka toxin' which people need to fool themselves into believing so as to survive. After all, it is perfectly rational to 'manage the news'. I personally think Beyonce really likes me and will come to my next birthday party and then we will braid each others' hair and become Best Friends forever and ever. She has hinted at this in many of her songs.
But I have no problem with the idea that other religions may also be probable enough for it to be rational to have faith in them. If it is highly uncertain which religion is true, it may be rational to bring in pragmatic considerations, such as which religion you feel culturally comfortable in, to select a faith to follow.
It would be equally rational not to bother.
Finally, I want to bring in one crucial element I haven’t mentioned so far: the extraordinary teaching of Yeshua. His focus on the poor and the weak, his talk of loving your enemies and turning the other cheek, his attacks on those who overvalue tradition or social status, were light years ahead of their time,
Not really. They were a big theme in, for example, the Book of Job which isn't specifically Jewish. The fact is, the ancient Middle East featured something like a Marxian class struggle between the landed class and those whose land had been mortgaged or who had fallen into slavery. The fact that Job was rich is quoted as the reason God is punishing him because rich people tend to steal from the widow and the orphan. Otherwise, how did they get so fucking rich?
and have played a crucial role in shaping the modern ethical ideals that we still struggle to live up to.
I think the Christian notion that the Katechon arises from God's 'mysterious economy' gives rise to the notion of an 'invisible hand' which guides even the most selfish to work for the common-weal. Religion has been the source of social, economic, and political mobility and progress because it promotes 'high trust' transactions even between strangers living far away from each other. There is also the question of the circulation of brides. You are more willing to entrust your daughter to a handsome young man living in a town far away because you know his family follows the same religious laws and customs as you do. In particular, monogamy may be normative and inheritance rights for widows may be better.
This in itself proves nothing. But, for me, it’s a vital element in the mix, giving credibility to the possibility that the events depicted in the New Testament describe some profound moment in the evolution of reality.
This is the Pauline view. Lord Jesus was the first to be resurrected. We can take this as proof that we will all be resurrected. Woe unto you if haven't been baptized and thus have chosen the right side!
Life is short and much is uncertain. We all have to take our leap of faith, whether that’s for secular humanism, one of the religions, or simply a vague conviction that there is some greater reality.
No. We can be systematically skeptical of all appearances. Indeed, some scientists suggest that our Universe may be a hologram. There is a hidden dimension to us such that our authentic consciousness is quite different from this imperfect and illusory mind whose importunities bear down upon us.
In deciding, it’s important to reflect on what’s likely to be true but also what’s likely to bring happiness and fulfilment. For my own part, I have found a faith that is certain to bring me happiness, and which is, in my judgment, probable enough to be worth taking a bet on.
Sadly, that is not what Christianity teaches. Mother Theresa had Faith but she still underwent a 'dark night of the soul'. As for 'betting', why do so if the thing is 'zero-sum'? Speculation is another matter. It may be 'positive sum'. I suppose the author feels the form of Christianity he has arrived on is more 'eusocial' and progressive than the Catholicism he encountered in adolescence. But he may have arrived at the same outcome if he had remained a Catholic. One can imagine him finding a humane and erudite confessor who would have guided him to greatness in his chosen field. But, if this did not happen, who is to say such was not God's plan for him?
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