• Punshhh
    3k
    What defensible core?
    I would say reduced to the God in each of us, that essence of self or divinity/atman in each of us.
  • Janus
    17.2k
    I'm afraid I was not very clear here. My immediate point was that dialogue between believers and non-believers cannot take place, or cannot take place productively, if each side digs in to its own position and exchanges arguments in the way that has become traditional in modern times.Ludwig V

    I don't know what a productive discussion between religionists and secularists could look like. My only aim is to get a clear idea of what kinds of things we can know we have good reason to believe and what we cannot know we have good reason to believe but may believe simply on the basis of faith.

    The difficulty for some religionists is that they don't seem to want to acknowledge the obvious―that there can be no substantive evidence for belief in the existence of what cannot, even in principle, be observed.

    So, I have no argument with believing just on the basis of faith (or feeling, or intuition) ―and the best outcome I can imagine in a dialogue between religionists and secularists would be agreement on the
    epistemology.

    Perhaps the weakest link (although it may seem entirely normal to many philosophers) your move from "without determinable content" through "without conceptual content" to "may have affective content".Ludwig V

    Perhaps I should have said 'without coherent conceptual content". Anyway you haven't explained as to what you think are the weaknesses in the argument. I think what you offer below is something of a strawman.

    Fear of COVD, for example, is a reaction to various facts/truths about COVID; it is a combination of cognitive and non-cognitive content (which rests on values or needs). More than that, fear is more than a matter of feelings, but is about certain kinds of behavior - it is about how one reacts to the facts. So I do not see why affective content does not count as determinable content or even as conceptual content? The existence of some god is not just a neutral fact, but requires a reaction. For those reasons, I'm afraid I can't attribute any content to the "feeling of believing".Ludwig V

    Covid is a bad analogy because it is something real that could kill you. Take as example fear of eternal suffering in hell―the content there is based on ideas which cannot be distinguished from fiction, because we have no way of deciding rationally whether hell exists or not. So, to be sure the fear has conceptual content, but there is no coherent concept, in the sense of something drawn from actual experience, of what hell could be. Same obviously applies to God.

    The phrase "beliefs determined by faith" sounds as if faith is somethiing separate from belief, but surely what you mean is (roughly) "beliefs not determined by evidence"? I would agree that there is a spectrum there, from conclusive evidence through partial evidence. I think that beliefs based on authority are diffeerent in kind. In a sense, of course, authority can be regarded as a kind of evidence, but it is a rather different kind of evidence - being, as it were, evidence that the source is trustworthy.Ludwig V

    By 'faith" I mean 'feeling'. I can believe something simply because "it feels right" or "it rings true". That is what I think faith is.

    I don't think authority is good evidence for the existence of anything unless it is based on sound observations. Scripture and the church tell us that God really exists, but that telling cannot be good evidence because people saying something about something they cannot know cannot count as evidence in the way people saying something about something they can know does.
  • Astrophel
    636
    Quite, but not just the questions, also posture, practice, direction, communion.

    Faith is a broad brush phrase in this kind of discussion and needs to be teased out.

    Religious faith is an inevitable consequence of one’s approach to, or questioning of our origin, creation, purpose. If one is to make any progress beyond, “I/we don’t know”. Science and philosophy can’t help us. Other than in describing the world and how it works and helping us to order and refine our thoughts.

    There is faith in God, faith in redemption, faith in society and human interaction. Faith in oneself, faith in truth. Faith as a tool used in mysticism, or by the ascetic.
    Punshhh

    One could argue: posture, practice, direction, communion are all questions: what posture, practice, etc., should be done, accepted, believed? This gives epistemology the privileged place among the rest, because prior to anything that is accepted as true and important, there is the question of knowing this to be the case. Then we have the problem of evidence, right? I mean, before one goes about being directed, one has to have a well grounded belief for doing so. And the temptation to ignore this just throws the matter into the air; believing without justification moves toward faith (even Kierkegaard's faith is fraught with issues), which begs a lot of questions.

    Faith in what? If there are no epistemic rules to faith, then faith is arbitrary, and this leads to a lot of very stupid thinking with awful consequences. That is the practical argument against religious faith. The other is that if there is something deeply important about our existence, faith will inhibit discovery: faith is inherently dogmatic (though reading Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety takes this to task. K is a complicated thinker, and his ideas about faith require an entirely different kind of discussion).

    So I'm not a fan of faith. All that you call "faith in..." I say is a call for inquiry. OTOH, I realize that not everyone has the "leisure" time or inclination for this, and that so many face intractable miseries and to these good people, I yield. I speak here only of the "conversation humanity is having with itself" as Rorty put it, which is a push toward authenticity or sincerity or truth.

    Philosophy certainly can help "direct" thought. It does depend on what one reads, however. Reading exclusively Nietzsche or anglo american analytic philosophy, which is driven by positivism and naturalism and which is altogether contemptuous of metaphysics, is not going to open thought to responsible inquiry. It is just as dogmatic as faith tends to be.

    But then there is Husserl, and the neoHusserlian strain of thought that is very active today. This is where things get very interesting. Imagine metaphysics brought INTO immanence, such that the finitude that wants to draw a line between what can and cannot be spoken finds within itself the eternity to which it stands in opposition.
  • Punshhh
    3k
    One could argue: posture, practice, direction, communion are all questions: what posture, practice, etc., should be done, accepted, believed?

    Well yes there is a role for the intellect in these refinements. But what I am alluding to is an interplay between the intellect and being, or self. The intellect alone cannot bridge the gap between the intellect/personality/ego and the essence of one’s being, or self. Or another way of describing this is that if one accepts that there is a divinity within one’s being, then the intellect/personality/ego is required to accommodate this and reach an interactive orientation (communion) with that divinity. Thus allowing that divinity to progressively play a greater role in the life of the person.

    This is what I call the science of orientation*, this is a process of adapting aspects of self to become in alignment with that divinity. Rather like an astrolabe where the dials are turned, aligned with observations in the world, or the skies, to take an accurate reading.

    These things can be done absent the intellect through prayer, or meditation. So in a very real sense faith and belief are not the product of thinking but rather prayer, or communion. Although the intellect can play a role for thinkers in this process. So yes philosophy is a useful practice for those who have an intellectual inquiry.

    This gives epistemology the privileged place among the rest, because prior to anything that is accepted as true and important, there is the question of knowing this to be the case.
    Again, I’m not denying this, but rather saying that this intellectual enquiry is not fundamental to the practice. In a real sense it doesn’t matter what God, or Cosmogony one follows (within reason), one takes one’s pick of the schools or religions available. Also there is not a requirement for the existence, or nature of God to be established. Truth is another matter, but can be accommodated through humility and a focus on the simple path to divinity within the self.

    I mean, before one goes about being directed, one has to have a well grounded belief for doing so.
    Yes, however this is often a calling, an insatiable need to find out, a sense of the divine. Belief doesn’t necessarily come before these other motivating factors. But yes for the novice it is advisable to join an established school, or broaden one’s reading as wide as possible. To go out into the world to live a rounded life within a community to ground the self. Although for some people these things all come naturally, intuitively. It is also not advisable for people with childhood trauma, psychological issues etc.

    Faith in what?
    We may be talking of different understandings of faith. For me I would substitute the word belief for faith here. Belief is more about the narrative one has developed and is an intellectual development. Whereas faith is not necessarily associated with any particular narrative, but is more a feeling, emotion, conviction.

    But then there is Husserl, and the neoHusserlian strain of thought that is very active today.

    This sounds interesting, I am not well read in academic philosophy, I would be interested to learn more in this direction.


    *When I say the science of orientation, I am referring to the practice of the alignment of the person with the divine as practiced in different ways within the different religious and spiritual schools. This will eventually I expect become a scientific practice. Which it has already to an extent become within Hinduism in the yogic traditions.
  • Astrophel
    636
    I'd say it is about setting aside big claims and just looking at what shows up in human experience, for instance feelings of awe, moral responsibility, love, the numinous, meaning. The “defensible core” is the part of that experience that still cuts through and remains with us even if we don’t assume God is a 'real' being. Meaning that God isn’t seen as a thing out there, but more like a deep sense of meaning that arrives through experience and gives shape to how we understand life.Tom Storm

    As I see it, you lean either in or out. If you are in, then philosophy really has no place, save the entertainment value of marginal thinking, and you join clubs, go to weddings and funerals, take the family out to dinner now and then, and so on. That is IN, and it is a stand alone, finite totality, accessible and filled with affirmations and restrictions that constitute an evolving dialectic that is free and available to inquiry, like a dictionary is there, available to define the world.

    Or if you're like me, you are out, then none of this is very interesting, for it all rests on a foundation of indeterminacy. People like me live in the light of this indeterminacy. For those that are IN, the world "sticks" to the understanding as an indissoluble bond. These are engaged people, so confident that everything is what it IS, because doing something is done best in full immersion, and foundational doubt rarely touches this world. Foundational doubt is the absolute "out" of such engagement. Go down this path, this phenomenological reduction that removes all familiarity, and you end up either like Sartre's Roquentin, weird and disturbed, or like Emerson, who, standing in a "bare common," cold and cloudy, testifies

    The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am
    part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then
    foreign and accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances,–master
    or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of
    uncontained and immortal beauty


    Or, with me, a bit of both, decidedly leaning toward Emerson. I think this is in the vicinity of the "deep sense of meaning" you speak of.
  • Ludwig V
    2k
    So, I have no argument with believing just on the basis of faith (or feeling, or intuition) ―and the best outcome I can imagine in a dialogue between religionists and secularists would be agreement on the epistemology.Janus
    Well, agreement on the epistemology would be good. It would be even better if that agreement gave a basis for tolerating other religions. I realize that in many, perhaps most, places, there is already a great deal of toleration, and even co-operation through cross-religion links of one kind or another. But in another sense, it is very hard to see how there could possible be agreement between theists and atheists - or even between one religion and another. But if that could be accepted, a great deal of hot air and wasted time would be avoided.

    The difficulty for some religionists is that they don't seem to want to acknowledge the obvious―that there can be no substantive evidence for belief in the existence of what cannot, even in principle, be observed.Janus
    It depends what you mean by observation. I don't want to over-generalize, but many religious people do claim that their faith is based on experience. Some of it is mystical, some not. Religions are a way of life, a practice based on a way of looking at - interpreting - the world. So they govern how experience is interpreted. That's partly why arguing as if the questions were simply empirical is a waste of time.

    Covid is a bad analogy because it is something real that could kill you.Janus
    I chose it deliberately because it is not a religious phenomenon. The cognitive content of emotions is fundamental to all emotion, not just religious emotion. (Moods, such as anxiety or depression are a somewhat different kettle of fish.) My account here is only intended as an indicative summary of the line of argument.
    See Stanford Encyclopedia - Emotion or
    Internet Encyclopedia - Emotion

    So, to be sure the fear has conceptual content, but there is no coherent concept, in the sense of something drawn from actual experience, of what hell could be. Same obviously applies to God.Janus
    In one way, of course, you are right. But there are descriptions and images of hell in plenty, and they are drawn from experience. As for God, the ideas about God do seem to me to be drawn from experience. God as Lord and Master, God as Father (or Mother). Your criterion of coherence seems to me to be unduly restrictive. The idea of a unicorn or dragon, or even of heaven and hell may nor may not be coherent in some sense. But there is sufficient coherence to enable people to react to them emotionally.

    By 'faith" I mean 'feeling'. I can believe something simply because "it feels right" or "it rings true". That is what I think faith is.Janus
    I wouldn't argue with that.

    I don't think authority is good evidence for the existence of anything unless it is based on sound observations.Janus
    To be sure, authority can be, often is, wrong. But much, or most, of what we know is based on it. I feel a bit like Hume recognizing that induction doesn't provide a sound basis for knowledge and recognizing that we are going to continue to use it anyway.
  • Ludwig V
    2k
    I see the distinction, I wasn’t thinking of lifestyle as a choice so much as a direction of travel that one had arrived at. That lifestyle, or practice that is adopted initially would develop into a way of life through an evolution.Punshhh
    I see your point. It's an important feature of most (all?) religions.

    There are due to their origins a number of schools(philosophies/religions) through which a believer/aspirant may come to their faith. Some more orthodox, some more devotional, some more meditation based. Some in which a deity is front and centre, others where any deity is barely defined.Punshhh
    Lots of different kinds of ways. I don't see that as a problem, in itself. It's the claim to exclusivity that makes the difficulties.

    Also their are people who explore a number of schools and then follow their own path and people who follow a path, unaware that they are, thinking perhaps that they have no faith, or interest in religious, or spiritual matters at all.Punshhh
    Yes. Everyone is following some path or other, even if they are making it up as they go along.
  • Astrophel
    636
    . Or another way of describing this is that if one accepts that there is a divinity within one’s being, then the intellect/personality/ego is required to accommodate this and reach an interactive orientation (communion) with that divinity. Thus allowing that divinity to progressively play a greater role in the life of the person.

    This is what I call the science of orientation*, this is a process of adapting aspects of self to become in alignment with that divinity. Rather like an astrolabe where the dials are turned, aligned with observations in the world to take an accurate reading.

    These things can be done absent the intellect through prayer, or meditation. So in a very real sense faith and belief are not the product of thinking but rather prayer, or communion. Although the intellect can play a role for thinkers in this process. So yes philosophy is a useful practice for those who have an intellectual inquiry.
    Punshhh

    If you like. But what is this "science of orientation"? The moment you start explaining this, you begin a kind of intellectualizing, for things have to make sense, and they don't belong to everyday accounts, but somehow stand outside of these, yet everydayness is not separated, and if you don't talk about this kind of thing, you could get things wrong interpretatively and you could be missing important contributions to your understanding of what you are doing.

    Of course, if you are going for the truly radical, sequestering yourself from all mundane assumptions, retiring to a meditation mat for a program of self annihilation because intimations of divinity are so clear and compelling, then I can hardly complain. I actually believe in such things, and I know people who have made this move to close off entanglements. And see what Meister Eckhart says about attachments:

    You should know that true detachment is nothing else but mind that stands unmoved by all accidents of joy or sorrow, honor, shame, or disgrace, as a mountain of lead stands unmoved by a breath of wind. This immovable detachment brings a man
    into the greatest likeness to God. For the reason why God is God is because of His immovable
    detachment, and from this detachment He has His purity, His simplicity, and His immutability.
    Therefore, if a man is to be like God, as far as a creature can have likeness with God, this must
    come from detachment. This draws a man into purity, and from purity into simplicity, and from
    simplicity into immutability, and these things make a likeness between God and that man; and
    this likeness must occur through grace, for grace draws a man away from all temporal things and
    purges him of all that is transient. You must know, too, that to be empty of all creatures is to be
    full of God, and to be full of all creatures is to be empty of God. You should also know that God
    has stood in this unmoved detachment from all eternity


    When he speaks of temporal things, there is nothing that survives. Language does not survive, for it is in the "text" (Derrida; read 'context') that the most basic assumptions, those to be expurgated, hold "the world" together. Anyway, it's a big move.
  • Tom Storm
    10k
    Or if you're like me, you are out, then none of this is very interesting, for it all rests on a foundation of indeterminacy.Astrophel

    I hear you.
  • Punshhh
    3k
    But what is this "science of orientation"?
    It is a phrase I have coined, there is no peer reviewed scientific establishment, or body of literature. However all the schools that I have looked into have a teaching and practice which amounts to the same thing. To put it as simply as I can. It is the process of the alignment of the conscious self with the divine self and by inference the divine. The result being that one lives a religious, or spiritual life guided by the divine. Which crucially involves the process of the transfiguration of the self.

    The reason I keep emphasising this is that in these schools the focus is on developments and changes within the self. Rather like the unfurling of the petals of a flower, this process is already developed, or growing within us and is simply being facilitated in this unfurling.

    The moment you start explaining this, you begin a kind of intellectualizing, for things have to make sense, and they don't belong to everyday accounts, but somehow stand outside of these, yet everydayness is not separated, and if you don't talk about this kind of thing, you could get things wrong interpretatively and you could be missing important contributions to your understanding of what you are doing.
    This is a concern and any novice should enroll in an established school, so as to follow a long established and tested ideology. But here we are discussing this as people who already have an understanding of these things and are just exchanging thoughts about it.

    Of course, if you are going for the truly radical, sequestering yourself from all mundane assumptions, retiring to a meditation mat for a program of self annihilation because intimations of divinity are so clear and compelling, then I can hardly complain. I actually believe in such things, and I know people who have made this move to close off entanglements. And see what Meister Eckhart says about attachments:
    Christian ascetics are some of the most strict practitioners, however there are alternative teachings and practice which are not so stark. Many mystics live a “normal” life. I don’t agree with what you write in this passage;
    For those that are IN, the world "sticks" to the understanding as an indissoluble bond. These are engaged people, so confident that everything is what it IS, because doing something is done best in full immersion, and foundational doubt rarely touches this world. Foundational doubt is the absolute "out" of such engagement.
    For me this is a description of what I would call a fiery aspirant. Someone who is forcing their practice to initiate some kind of initiation, or crisis, through which they will emerge in some kind of purified, or transfigured state. Also I assure you there are very few people who have absolute certainty around these things.
    I would suggest that there are many who live a relatively normal life, but who have undergone some developments in the self and hold no deeply held beliefs, or faith. But who have in themselves grown to a point, like in my analogy of the flower, where they are unfurling. Some even entirely unaware. In this circumstance, they may emerge out of some development in their life even more purified, or transfigured than the fiery aspirant.

    Anyway, my point being that faith and the way it is held and used by people is not reliant on any philosophy, while often accompanied by a philosophy, which by its presence enriches the experience of being a person of faith.
  • Janus
    17.2k
    It depends what you mean by observation. I don't want to over-generalize, but many religious people do claim that their faith is based on experience. Some of it is mystical, some not. Religions are a way of life, a practice based on a way of looking at - interpreting - the world. So they govern how experience is interpreted. That's partly why arguing as if the questions were simply empirical is a waste of time.Ludwig V

    Right, religious faith is based on personal experience and culturally mediated interpretation of that experience. My whole argument is that personal experience and cultural mediation are relativistic and so do not constitute good evidence for the truth of propositional beliefs, although of course they do motivate and condition beliefs.

    The cognitive content of emotions is fundamental to all emotion, not just religious emotion.Ludwig V

    Of course it would be foolish to disagree with that.

    In one way, of course, you are right. But there are descriptions and images of hell in plenty, and they are drawn from experience. As for God, the ideas about God do seem to me to be drawn from experience. God as Lord and Master, God as Father (or Mother). Your criterion of coherence seems to me to be unduly restrictive. The idea of a unicorn or dragon, or even of heaven and hell may nor may not be coherent in some sense. But there is sufficient coherence to enable people to react to them emotionally.Ludwig V

    Right, all our descriptions and images of hell and gods are drawn for experience in the sense that they are cobbled together from images and associations gleaned form everyday experience. When I say they are no coherent or cogent I mean that they are fictions, since we can have no idea whet the real hell or god looks like, even assuming that they existed.

    To be sure, authority can be, often is, wrong. But much, or most, of what we know is based on it. I feel a bit like Hume recognizing that induction doesn't provide a sound basis for knowledge and recognizing that we are going to continue to use it anyway.Ludwig V

    I think Hume was merely pointing out that inductive reasoning is not like deductive reasoning in that conclusions necessarily follow from premises in the latter, but not the former. We have good reason to trust inductive reasoning because it works almost all of the time and we have a vast, exceedingly successful and coherent body of knowledge based on it.
  • Astrophel
    636
    Again, I’m not denying this, but rather saying that this intellectual enquiry is not fundamental to the practice. In a real sense it doesn’t matter what God, or Cosmogony one follows (within reason), one takes one’s pick of the schools or religions available. Also there is not a requirement for the existence, or nature of God to be established. Truth is another matter, but can be accommodated through humility and a focus on the simple path to divinity within the self.Punshhh

    The distinction between one God and another can be a trivial distinction, but as to truth, one does want to be deceived, deluded, wrong minded about what is accepted. God is perhaps a term that is first to go, for it carries connotative values that affect the openness of acceptance. It is not as if there is nothing to say, and the saying wants to be aligned with what is there.

    Again, if you don't want to ask any questions because what you are doing is a "doing" not an understanding, and there you are, like a radical Buddhist, buried in seclusion, and the whole idea is to shut up and stop manufacturing distracting engagements, then fine, perhaps enlightenment and liberation will be yours. But if you do want to understand what is going on, and this will be an essentially descriptive matter, then you will want to look into phenomenology, which gives one the means to do this.


    Yes, however this is often a calling, an insatiable need to find out, a sense of the divine. Belief doesn’t necessarily come before these other motivating factors. But yes for the novice it is advisable to join an established school, or broaden one’s reading as wide as possible. To go out into the world to live a rounded life within a community to ground the self. Although for some people these things all come naturally, intuitively. It is also not advisable for people with childhood trauma, psychological issues etc.Punshhh

    Claims about divine sense I don't take issue with. But what one says about this, I do. What IS an intimation of the divine? You don't think there is a language that can talk about this? But there is. It's not what you think, though. Talking about such things is talk about the presuppositions of ordinary affairs. God is not abstract and remote, as I am guessing you agree, but is IN the world of lived experience; ignored absurd to talk about, but there to be discussed.


    We may be talking of different understandings of faith. For me I would substitute the word belief for faith here. Belief is more about the narrative one has developed and is an intellectual development. Whereas faith is not necessarily associated with any particular narrative, but is more a feeling, emotion, conviction.Punshhh

    I don't think you can separate belief from conviction and feeling, especially conviction, which is synonymous to belief. Anyway, if faith has no object, nothing to have faith IN, then it must be
    entirely OPEN. No ideology, no thesis. Just episodic engagement, and I give this to you. But it does align with serious meditation, without the Mahayana thinking. But there is a good deal of what comes from Eastern disciplines that is not ideological at all. The Prajnaparamita, e.g., is striking, and inspired and right, if one's thinks carefully. There are places in the Abbhidamma that are not exhaustingly detailed focus on spiritual categories. These and other work because they are phenomenological, that is, they are part of discovery that can only occur when the "the world" is suspended.

    It is a phrase I have coined, there is no peer reviewed scientific establishment. However all the schools that I have looked into have a teaching and practice which amounts to the same thing. To put it as simply as I can. It is the process of the alignment of the conscious self with the divine self and by inference the divine. The result being that one lives a religious, or spiritual life guided by the divine. Which crucially involves the process of the transfiguration of the self.

    The reason I keep emphasising this is that in these schools the focus is on developments and changes within the self. Rather like the unfurling of the petals of a flower, this process is already developed, or growing within us and is simply being facilitated in this unfurling.
    Punshhh

    Sounds like what Buddhists talk abou: as you say, teaching and practice are the same thing. Meister Eckhart is a lot like this. Reading his sermons is an extraordinary experience, if one is so disposed. But the East and the West come together philosophically, that is, phenomenologically, in Husserl's reduction. Call it jnana yoga, the way thought can undo itself, undo the intense relationship between everydayness and freedom. Divinity is a matter of "seeing" and not just passively receiving, I would argue with some emphasis.

    I am agreeing with the idea of spiritual growth, though that term 'spiritual', as well as all other familiar terms, carries baggage of multiple contexts and usage, habits of thought already in place. The desire to be rid of old vocabularies is based on an attempt to deliver experience from the consensus that defines normal living. hence the difficulty of phenomenology.
  • Astrophel
    636
    This is a concern and any novice should enroll in an established school, so as to follow a long established and tested ideology. But here we are discussing this as people who already have an understanding of these things and are just exchanging thoughts about it.Punshhh

    Already have an understanding of what things? Again, if it is a matter of meditation classes, serious ones, insisting on freedom from the dynamics of the social self (Rorty says science is essentially social), and if all one adds is the term divinity, then I really don't have much to oppose. But if "things" are discussed, acknowledged, rejected, understood in their relation to the world, to familiarity, and if there is a perceived alteration in of the way awareness perceives its environment and its objects, its space and time, then this can be very rigorously done, in a helpful way, not distracting.

    Few can meditate all day long. If leisure time permits, read phenomenology.

    Christian ascetics are some of the most strict practitioners, however there are alternative teachings and practice which are not so stark. Many mystics live a “normal” life. I don’t agree with what you write in this passage;Punshhh

    So Kierkegaard says. His knight of faith can be a seller at a market. He thinks like this because he thinks like you do: faith is a profound surrender, and the intellect is no better than dogmatic belief. I don't agree or disagree with him on this. The approach to divinity is an alienation from the world, but read Paul, "I live and yet do not live - Christ lives in me." But to ask, what IS this about? is the proper question of philosophy. I hold that spirituality IS discovered IN a foundational analytic of our existence. In other words, one can see what Paul is talking about by putting down the demands of faith qua faith, that vacancy of thought in a "pure" "yielding to" (Kierkegaard called this nothing, the nothing one encounters when the question is put forth, for PRIOR to any intimation of divinity, one faces a world in primordial wonder, which is stolen away by culture, what you call "the normal life". Keep in mind, this world really is something to be overcome, not lived comfortably IN. The love one finds in normal matters issue from "deep" within, and the whole point is this profound discovery, which is an inherent resistance interest in "the world", is to move toward this, call it a divine primordiality. Kierkegaard may have believed that existential faith was possible for all, as do I, but he was principally concerned with the way religion had become a culture of religion---Christendom. He was a kind of medievalist, admiring the simplicity of a mind unhindered by thought and conventional extravagance, something he himself could not acquire with great success;

    But here I try to be very careful. Consider what divinity IS. Take yourself to a sunset, and observe. See how, at first, the experience is mundane and tame as a kitten. No foreign issues arise, and there you are, perhaps distracted by some outside interest; but your mission is to attend to the sunset as it IS, in the fullness of its presence, and, as Walt Whitman once put it, put all schools in abeyance, so you release yourself from the multitude of whatever's and put the present encounter to the forefront and all things that would otherwise possess you, fall away, and as they do, there is something that displaces all that mundane certainty, which is the "presence" of presence, and you see what is before you as if for the first time, but it is not "as if" at all, but really IS the first time, and you realize that you have been living mostly in memory and history (Heidegger's dasein in Being and Time. See especially in Division Two, section 64 and onward) and have been a prisoner of Time itself, are now somewhere entirely Other, and you never really knew "where" you were at all, because you were living a life of distracting affairs. And now as the sun lowers into the horizon, you understand what it was like for the ancient mind to think the sun to be a God, because the world is now saturated with a beauty so profound (the desideratum exceeds the desire, as Levinas says in Totality and Infinity) that one has to step beyond the boundaries of finitude to bring it to language.

    Now take this sublime presence, and ask a powerful question: what is suffering? And ask it in the same way, free of the presumption that hold sway in normal events, and discover that this, too, now is momentous, a staggering assault on our existence. This, too, is divinity, and now one understands the cross, redemption, and divine consummation. This is the core of religion, and God, and all churchy fetishes.
  • Ludwig V
    2k
    Right, religious faith is based on personal experience and culturally mediated interpretation of that experience. My whole argument is that personal experience and cultural mediation are relativistic and so do not constitute good evidence for the truth of propositional beliefs, although of course they do motivate and condition beliefs.Janus
    Personal experience and cultural mediation are the basis for all beliefs, aren't they? So why do you distinguish between false religious beliefs and true beliefs, as, for example, in science. There must be an additional element that isn't taken account of in this model.

    I think Hume was merely pointing out that inductive reasoning is not like deductive reasoning in that conclusions necessarily follow from premises in the latter, but not the former. We have good reason to trust inductive reasoning because it works almost all of the time and we have a vast, exceedingly successful and coherent body of knowledge based on it.Janus
    Well, I would debate some of that, but the outline is clear. The relevant question is what do you mean by saying that induction "works" and "successful"? I would be inclined to take that as some kind of pragmatism. (?)
  • Punshhh
    3k
    Thank you for your considered response, it’s appreciated. You covered a lot of ground and I may only focus in on one or two points for brevity.
    Firstly my comments about faith and other facets of being as something about being, independent of thought. Was only a comment about faith. Not about spiritual enquiry in general, which does involve the intellect and mind, teaching, learning and understanding. I thought it important to make this distinction at the outset. Rather like as you say here;
    But what one says about this, I do. What IS an intimation of the divine? You don't think there is a language that can talk about this? But there is. It's not what you think, though. Talking about such things is talk about the presuppositions of ordinary affairs. God is not abstract and remote, as I am guessing you agree, but is IN the world of lived experience; ignored absurd to talk about, but there to be discussed.
    We need to go beyond the presuppositions of ordinary affairs and I am saying that there are fundamental aspects of self and being, such as certain examples of faith which are not part of the conscious(thinking) mind. So in this enquiry we must deal with things inaccessible to the thinking mind. This has been done formally in the various schools, however for the mystic it is primarily a personal journey, perhaps guided by these teachings. Personal in the sense that it involves a synthesis and subtle relationship between the intellect, the self and the being. Revealing knowing and understanding which requires direct experience and practice.

    I have had a look at Husserl and see parallels with his ‘problem of constitution’, the state of ‘astonishment’ and the developing of a ground. With what I generally describe as questing. The aspirant quests so as to strip away his/her preconceptions, conditioning and habits of thought. Working within a spiritual framework of teachings.

    This inevitably brings me to the next question of when one reaches this point of a clear ground and is proficient in the practice of astonishment and constitution. What happens next? Where does the phenomenologist go from there?
  • Janus
    17.2k
    Personal experience and cultural mediation are the basis for all beliefs, aren't they? So why do you distinguish between false religious beliefs and true beliefs, as, for example, in science. There must be an additional element that isn't taken account of in this model.Ludwig V

    Science begins with everyday observations about which we could all agree. Observations can be accurate or inaccurate, so science is correctable. Religious beliefs are not like this―because their correctness or incorrectness cannot be demonstrated.

    Science begins by examining things as they present to us. The basic appearance of things in our environments is not culturally mediated, and they are present to all in a shared context so it is not a matter of merely personal experience, as it is with religious experiences.

    Well, I would debate some of that, but the outline is clear. The relevant question is what do you mean by saying that induction "works" and "successful"? I would be inclined to take that as some kind of pragmatism. (?)Ludwig V

    Science which is based on inductive reasoning has evolved into an immensely complex and coherent body of understanding, a cohesive picture of the nature of the world which has produced a great many effective technologies.
  • Janus
    17.2k
    I came across this interesting passage regarding the nature of faith, in a Wikipedia entry about Paul Tillich:

    Faith as ultimate concern
    According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Tillich believes the essence of religious attitudes is what he calls "ultimate concern". Separate from all profane and ordinary realities, the object of the concern is understood as sacred, numinous or holy. The perception of its reality is felt as so overwhelming and valuable that all else seems insignificant, and for this reason requires total surrender.[80] In 1957, Tillich defined his conception of faith more explicitly in his work, Dynamics of Faith.

    Man, like every living being, is concerned about many things, above all about those which condition his very existence … If [a situation or concern] claims ultimacy it demands the total surrender of him who accepts this claim … it demands that all other concerns … be sacrificed.[81]

    Tillich further refined his conception of faith by stating that, "Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It is the most centered act of the human mind ... it participates in the dynamics of personal life."[82]

    An arguably central component of Tillich's concept of faith is his notion that faith is "ecstatic". That is to say:

    It transcends both the drives of the nonrational unconsciousness and the structures of the rational conscious … the ecstatic character of faith does not exclude its rational character although it is not identical with it, and it includes nonrational strivings without being identical with them. 'Ecstasy' means 'standing outside of oneself' – without ceasing to be oneself – with all the elements which are united in the personal center.[83]

    In short, for Tillich, faith does not stand opposed to rational or nonrational elements (reason and emotion respectively), as some philosophers would maintain. Rather, it transcends them in an ecstatic passion for the ultimate.[84]

    It should also be noted that Tillich does not exclude atheists in his exposition of faith. Everyone has an ultimate concern, and this concern can be in an act of faith, "even if the act of faith includes the denial of God. Where there is ultimate concern, God can be denied only in the name of God"[85]


    It seems to me that the "ultimate concern" of any life governed by self-reflection is the basic ethical question "how should I Iive?" Could there be strictly empirical evidence available to guide me in answering that question?
  • Ludwig V
    2k
    Science begins with everyday observations about which we could all agree. Observations can be accurate or inaccurate, so science is correctable. Religious beliefs are not like this―because their correctness or incorrectness cannot be demonstrated.
    Science begins by examining things as they present to us. The basic appearance of things in our environments is not culturally mediated, and they are present to all in a shared context so it is not a matter of merely personal experience, as it is with religious experiences.
    Janus
    Of course, that is just an outline of the big picture. I don't disagree with it, exactly, though there are a number of devils in various details.
    But perhaps we can agree that it neatly explains why science and religion cannot conflict, doesn't it? I'm happy with that conclusion, and it seems that many people feel the same way, because they are both believers in a religion (ideology) and pursue science.
    On the other hand, if "The basic appearance of things in our environments is not culturally mediated, and they are present to all in a shared context" it would seem that there is something basic that is common to both religion and science. Yet you also post "personal experience" which is not shared and it seems that you think the foundation of religion lies there. But religious lives are lived in the shared world. The difference you are identifying seems to me (roughly) a matter of interpretation, of ways of seeing.

    It seems to me that the "ultimate concern" of any life governed by self-reflection is the basic ethical question "how should I Iive?" Could there be strictly empirical evidence available to guide me in answering that question?Janus
    It would be a mistake not to think that faith often involves quite prosaic and everyday matters, like whether the weather forecast is accurate. Tillich's faith is a different matter. I'm sure he's right to explain faith in terms that do not limit the scope of faith to religious faith, but identify it with decisions that lie at the heart of how we live - religious or no. I doubt that there could be strictly empirical evidence to guide us in answering these questions, because the decisions in question will affect how we interpret our experiences. But there is a common denominator - whether we can make our way through ordinary life without causing undue mayhem or causing our own misery and death.
  • J
    1.9k

    Could there be strictly empirical evidence available to guide me in answering that question [of how I should live]?Janus

    This caught my eye. Could you tighten up a couple of things? First, what would strictly empirical evidence be? Do you mean, say, physical evidence that is uninterpreted, or at least only minimally interpreted according to schema that would gain universal assent? Second, can evidence guide me without demanding or demonstrating a particular answer? I'm guessing that's what you mean, since otherwise you wouldn't say "guide" but something more like "determine" or "necessitate".
  • Leontiskos
    4.7k
    It seems to me that the "ultimate concern" of any life governed by self-reflection is the basic ethical question "how should I Iive?" Could there be strictly empirical evidence available to guide me in answering that question?Janus

    Why would one suppose that either Tillich's "ultimate concern" or else the question "how should I live" are not guided by empirical evidence?

    Here is your syllogism:

    1. All science is X
    2. No religion is X
    3. Therefore no religion is scientific

    In this case your X is "empirical." Elsewhere you have tried different X's. None of them seem to be sound.
  • Janus
    17.2k
    But perhaps we can agree that it neatly explains why science and religion cannot conflict, doesn't it? I'm happy with that conclusion, and it seems that many people feel the same way, because they are both believers in a religion (ideology) and pursue science.Ludwig V



    Yes, I see no reason why science and religion must conflict. The important point for me is intellectual honesty on both sides. Science cannot answer all questions about human life because many of the questions most important to us cannot avail themselves of strictly empirical means to drive knowledge.

    I have referred to phenomenology, analytic philosophy and philosophy of language as "quasi-empirical" in that they reflect, within their specific spheres of interest, on human experience in general and attempt to abstract its most general and necessary characteristics. The results cannot be as rigorously intersubjectively corroborated as the results of the natural sciences can.

    It seems to me that when it comes to metaphysical speculation and mystical or religious experience it becomes an even more personal matter. I have my own metaphysical and mystical leanings, but I see them as matters of taste just as aesthetic judgements are. Many religionists and religious philosophers do not seem to be satisfied with this conclusion and yet they seem to be unable to argue cogently for their objections.

    I doubt that there could be strictly empirical evidence to guide us in answering these questions, because the decisions in question will affect how we interpret our experiences. But there is a common denominator - whether we can make our way through ordinary life without causing undue mayhem or causing our own misery and death.Ludwig V

    Right, it comes down to the old maxim "you cannot derive an ought from an is". Empirical evidence shows us in ways that cannot be unbiasedly denied how things are (and I mean here how they are as they present to us, not in any fabulous absolute sense), but it cannot show us how they ought to be.
  • Astrophel
    636
    This inevitably brings me to the next question of when one reaches this point of a clear ground and is proficient in the practice of astonishment and constitution. What happens next? Where does the phenomenologist go from there?Punshhh

    Straight to a radical realization of the self. Nothing that has ever been observed is done so independently of the act of observing, i.e., the perceptual act has always been an integral part of its object, making an object an event, and not some stand alone thing. The world AS world is, if you will, always already saturated with consciousness. Phenomenology turns science on its head, and it really depends on who you read. Michel Henry, JeanLuc Marion, Emanuel Levinas follow Husserl's Kantian idealism, and hold that consciousness is absolute, and this kind of thinking is hard to follow, frankly, if one is not immersed in the ideas and the jargon. Heidegger's language often rules this thinking, so Being and Time is essential.

    Not that faith has no place, but rather that faith assumes the impossibility of grasping the infinite in a finite existence. This idea is prohibitive of metaphysics, and in the philosophers mentioned here, metaphysics is brought to life. At the center of this is Husserl's epoche: the reductive move from a world cluttered with contingent thinking, to one of the "pure" phenomenon, which is the hidden world "behind" normal experience. See Husserl's Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations, The Idea of Phenomenology, and, well , the rest.

    In the end, it depends on how intuitive the individual is. One really has to be already quite alienated to be motivated to do all that insane reading of dense philosophy that talks about things entirely foreign to common sense (consider that those you call mentally unstable and perhaps not suitable for your religious education may be the ones most disposed to understand it). This is metaphysics, the essence of religion.
  • Punshhh
    3k
    It seems to me that the "ultimate concern" of any life governed by self-reflection is the basic ethical question "how should I Iive?" Could there be strictly empirical evidence available to guide me in answering that question?
    Firstly there is the evidence of the lives lived of earlier people of self reflection.
    Secondly, implicit in living a life of faith one has faith in the guidance of whom one has faith in.

    In the second case, empirical evidence is irrelevant.
  • Punshhh
    3k
    Yet you also post "personal experience" which is not shared
    I don’t think we can rush to this conclusion, in a very real sense we are one being, so any so called personal experience may not be as personal as we might think.

    We are effectively clones of the being of our species. Yes in the outer world we have budded off into separate units, or people. But we may be more connected than we at first sight appear to be in the inner world. Just look at the behaviour of crowds, or other animals and plants which live in highly integrated colonies.
  • Punshhh
    3k
    Straight to a radical realization of the self.
    Yes, it’s easy to say this though, a different thing to do it.

    I recognise what you describe, which mirrors quite well the narrative I have followed via Theosophy. There are a number of routes to this point, which mirror each other like this.

    There are distinctions between them though. I have encountered some Metaphysicians on this site and they tend to be of the view that the human intellect is to reach the goal of the realisation of the self, through the power of thought, or even logic. This differs from the other narratives in that they are of the view that this goal is reached with the guidance of a deity, spirit,or higher self.

    This raises a number of issues, which leaves metaphysics out in the cold, unable to forge a connection with the unknown and leaving the human intellect on it’s own in reaching the goal.

    The primary issue I find with this situation is that it is a fundamental view, or conviction, in the other schools, that the transfiguration of the self requires a revelation of realities far beyond* what the human intellect can achieve from it’s position in the world we find ourselves in. That from this limited predicament we are blind to the realities beyond, have no access to them. That it is required for them to be revealed to us.

    Now I don’t deny that it may be possible for the intellect to bridge this divide given the appropriate circumstances. But I can’t see this happening in the near future, in such a primitive society(in terms of spiritual revelation). Or that there might be one, or two maverick genius minds who somehow achieve this goal through the power of thought alone. But I haven’t seen any evidence of this yet.

    In the end, it depends on how intuitive the individual is. One really has to be already quite alienated to be motivated to do all that insane reading of dense philosophy that talks about things entirely foreign to common sense (consider that those you call mentally unstable and perhaps not suitable for your religious education may be the ones most disposed to understand it).
    I don’t agree that it is for the alienated, or the mentally unstable. Because they would become captured by the ego during the process. It is for well rounded people who play a full role in society and have the impulse to follow this route.

    This is metaphysics, the essence of religion.
    Each school will invariably say this about their preferred method.

    * when I say beyond us this can be because;
    It is a reality which is inconceivable to a being using the human brain to exercise thought.
    It may be hidden from us, for some reason, or purpose.
    It might require the person to be hosted by the deity, thus enabling them to witness things that we cannot witness unaided. Or to reach some state unaided.
  • J
    1.9k


    human experience in generalJanus

    This, I think, deserves attention. You're saying that, because phenomenology et al. are at least "quasi-empirical," we can reasonably abstract from them to make statements about human life in general. This can't be rigorously intersubjective, but it is more so than mystical or religious experiences. Would it follow, then, that if most people had mystical experiences, we'd consider them also to be "quasi-empirical" and possible evidence for general conclusions? How many would we need? What would be the threshold beyond which the experiences gained evidentiary status?

    There's a general anti-religious argument that goes something like: "There isn't any personal God, because there's no evidence for such a being. That explains why so few people are 'mystics' and claim to have such direct evidence. They're a little crazy, and are misinterpreting their experiences." The question is, Which way does the reasoning go? Are we saying that the lack of evidence shows the non-existence of God, or are we saying that, because God does not exist, there couldn't be such evidence? If it's the latter, that would commit us to saying that even if everybody had mystical experiences, they'd still be wrong in believing they were evidence for a personal God. I think this is what most of the atheists I know would say: You can't have evidence for unicorns because there aren't any. Those who believe in them nonetheless are, charitably, misguided.

    So compare that to our (relative) confidence in the conclusions of quasi-empirical inquiries such as philosophy. Do we have confidence in them merely because the experiences they're based on are so widespread? Or is it rather that we have independent, non-experiential reasons for believing in the credibility of these experiences -- and thus expect most people to have them?
  • Leontiskos
    4.7k


    Yep. :up:

    And note here that the whole crux is the coherence of intersubjective approaches to truth. Is something made true because lots of people believe it? Or do lots of people believe it because it is true? Or is truth something else entirely, such that something can be true even if lots of people do not believe it?

    The intersubjective analysis is of course highly dependent on the sample. When and where the sample is taken will largely determine whether some proposition is intersubjectively held.
  • Astrophel
    636
    There are distinctions between them though. I have encountered some Metaphysicians on this site and they tend to be of the view that the human intellect is to reach the goal of the realisation of the self, through the power of thought, or even logic. This differs from the other narratives in that they are of the view that this goal is reached with the guidance of a deity, spirit,or higher self.

    This raises a number of issues, which leaves metaphysics out in the cold, unable to forge a connection with the unknown and leaving the human intellect on it’s own in reaching the goal.

    The primary issue I find with this situation is that it is a fundamental view, or conviction, in the other schools, that the transfiguration of the self requires a revelation of realities far beyond* what the human intellect can achieve from it’s position in the world we find ourselves in. That from this limited predicament we are blind to the realities beyond, have no access to them. That it is required for them to be revealed to us.

    Now I don’t deny that it may be possible for the intellect to bridge this divide given the appropriate circumstances. But I can’t see this happening in the near future, in such a primitive society(in terms of spiritual revelation). Or that there might be one, or two maverick genius minds who somehow achieve this goal through the power of thought alone. But I haven’t seen any evidence of this yet.
    Punshhh

    But to see such a bridge, one has to step into it. Metaphysics is reborn in thinkers like Jean Luc Marion. Alas, getting TO him, one has to go through Heidegger and Husserl. This is hard to do, I mean, this is a doctoral thesis. One could spend one's life reading and thinking about the ontological and phenomenological "divide".

    Talk about "other realities" is exactly the kind of thinking that relegates metaphysics to the bin of absurdities. Where does any idea about the world at all find its descriptive possiblities? In what is already there, in the totality of meaning possibilities of the world one is thrown into. And what "reality" is beingtalked about if not that which is IN the givenness of the world? Talk about "other" realities impossibly remote to all that in which we find ourselves normally, and you have no basis for an evidential ground for understanding. (See the way the Catholic church has turned Heideggerian in its denial of the infinte distance that separates the self from God. A turn toward Meister Eckhart, whose sermons teeter on mysticism. See Karl Rahner, e.g.) This is what religious dogma is made of, and new age superstition. Don't get me wrong, I actually do believe religious people and spiritualists of various sorts are intuitively insightful, even profoundly so, greater than I can imagine. But what theysay about this lacks discipline. And what is this discipline? Phenomenology is essentially descriptive, and is as committed to this as any scientist committed to naturalism, but it doesn't look for quantitative categories to talk about relations, intensities, causes and a linear sense of time or a geometrical sense of space. One is rather brought to face a world that is "there" as the presupposed phenomenality that is the world PRIOR to quantification, and prior to the presumptions of knowing that constitute the everyday things "proximal and for the most part" (Heidegger's term, meaning familiar and readily "there" to understand something) accepted by all.

    Did I say lacks discipline? Reading the Abhidhamma I am overwhelmed by the discipline, but this is an ancient Buddhist text that reads like a phenomenological analysis, another order of signification that discards mundane interests. It strikes me as I read through that it is essentially descriptive of consciousness and the complex ways it is entangled in the world, a veritable list of spiritual pathologies? Sort of. But int he end, all of this, Buddhists should be running miles away from, for the summom bonum of Buddhism is nirvana, and there is really nothing one can say about this "as such"; but then, one can say a great deal about what falls short of this, and hence this dense compendium.

    This is essentially the way I look at phenomenology: it is an analytic of our entanglements in the world that is dismissive of nothing, least of all that which is in the bewildering features of consciousness, the "call" of transcendence that is structurally IN the world itself, for consciousness and the world cannot be separated, which is an abiding premise of this philosophy. The most conspicuous of all this is affectivity, pathos, the passionate modality of this "value" dimension (as Wittgenstein puts in his Tractatus), if you will, keeping in mind that when language gets a hold of this, it is deflationary and pragmatic, and passion becomes contextualized, the usual, available for conversation. The task that faces the phenomenologist is to undo this, and this undoes everything, puts distance between one and ordinary matters. Two worlds emerge and one lives a threshold existence to live at all. (I refer to schizophrenics as perhaps those closest to this threshold: of course, deeply disturbed, but then, this disruption IS with the world as we know it at the most basic level. What they "say" in their delusional ramblings and paranoia and hallucinations, screams pathology, yet it is also a radical disruption of the ordinary acceptance of things that is exactly the cause of, call it "spiritual delusion": the thoughtless engagement of habits and familiarity that bind one to everydayness. I have known such people, and they also possess an original intensity that is so taboo in society. We live in a Freudian cubicle of sorts, says Deleuze, that so neutralizes what we are, so trivializes what we are, and here we "forget" the depth of our existence.

    So, to refer back to my original response, if there are "other" realities, they must be discovered in this reality, which is phenomenality. This mundane consciousness of fence posts, clouds and computers, is "always already" what it is called to be in the transcendental "other" that beckons. The task lies in the analysis that reinterprets this world, and this lies with language which, after all, is not simply a structure of thought that sits like a ontologically distinct stratum---but reaches deep within the relation with and in the world. Undoing the way language occludes, conceals, distorts, recasts all things into something reality is "not" (a "hyperreality"? See Baudrillard, though he was following Heidegger et al, and had no thoughts about anything transcendentally imposing on analysis; but to be clear, Heidegger is a threshold thinker).

    I don’t agree that it is for the alienated, or the mentally unstable. Because they would become captured by the ego during the process. It is for well rounded people who play a full role in society and have the impulse to follow this route.Punshhh

    Well rounded? Okay. I am pretty well rounded. But then, I live two lives. The other is not well rounded at all, for there is nothing to round it out with save pure phenomenality, and this is a question AND a resolution in one. It has depth and meaning that will not be rounded, or contained; nor does it carry one into dizzying heights of irrationality. It is completely still, and the distance it creates is what I am, a self discovery. I read Michel Henry to look deeper, and of course, the Abhidhamma: Take a look here (lengthy but worth it, I think):

    Having thus gained a correct view of the real nature
    of his self, freed from the false notion of an identical substance of mind and matter, he attempts to investigate the cause of this “Ego-personality”. He realises that everything worldly, himself not excluded, is conditioned by causes past or present, and that this existence is due to past ignorance (avijjà), craving (taõhà), attachment (upàdàna), Kamma, and physical food (àhàra) of the present life. On
    account of these five causes this personality has arisen and as the past activities have conditioned the present, so the present will condition the future. Meditating thus, he transcends all doubts with regard to the past, present, and future (Kankhàvitaraõavisuddhi). Thereupon he contemplates that all conditioned things are transient (Anicca), subject to suffering (Dukkha), and devoid of an immortal soul (Anattà). Wherever he turns his eyes, he sees nought but these three characteristics standing out in bold relief. He realises that life is a mere flowing, a continuous undivided movement. Neither in a celestial plane nor on earth does he find any genuine happiness, for every form of pleasure is only a prelude to pain. What is transient is therefore subject to suffering and where change and sor85 row prevail there cannot be a permanent ego. As he is thus absorbed in meditation, a day comes when, to his surprise, he witnesses an aura emanating from his body (Obhàsa). He experiences an unprecedented pleasure, happiness, and quietude. He becomes even-minded and strenuous. His religious fervour increases, and mindfulness becomes perfect, and Insight extraordinarily keen


    Not that there are no questions about this, but it is essentially a step into metaphysics. Not an abstract and assailable idea at all. Yes, assailable descriptively, but the fault lies in language, not in insight.

    Each school will invariably say this about their preferred method.Punshhh

    Until al schools are in abeyance. This is the point of phenomenology. Husserl begins Cartesian Meditations intent to find,

    a knowledge for which he can answer from the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute insights. If I have decided to live with this as my aim the decision that alone can start me on the course of a philosophical development I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge.
  • Tom Storm
    10k
    There's a general anti-religious argument that goes something like: "There isn't any personal God, because there's no evidence for such a being. That explains why so few people are 'mystics' and claim to have such direct evidence. They're a little crazy, and are misinterpreting their experiences." The question is, Which way does the reasoning go? Are we saying that the lack of evidence shows the non-existence of God, or are we saying that, because God does not exist, there couldn't be such evidence? If it's the latter, that would commit us to saying that even if everybody had mystical experiences, they'd still be wrong in believing they were evidence for a personal God. I think this is what most of the atheists I know would say: You can't have evidence for unicorns because there aren't any. Those who believe in them nonetheless are, charitably, misguided.J

    Well, atheists I know would not say, as you write, “there isn’t any personal god.” They would say instead that there are no compelling grounds for belief in a personal god, though they remain open in principle to revising that view should persuasive evidence arise.

    Are we saying that the lack of evidence shows the non-existence of God, or are we saying that, because God does not exist, there couldn't be such evidence? If it's the latter, that would commit us to saying that even if everybody had mystical experiences, they'd still be wrong in believing they were evidence for a personal God.J

    Well, I think many atheists would more likely start with: there are no good reasons for belief in a personal God and one reason sometimes offered is mystical or personal experience of God. However, this is not a compelling justification, since such experiences rely on subjective testimony, which is inherently problematic.

    The difference between some theists and atheists lies in the willingness to accept a subjective psychological experience, experiences that, while meaningful to the individual, could have multiple naturalistic explanations and thus can't meaningfully serve as reliable evidence for the existence of a divine being.

    That said, I've known a number of number of Catholic clergy who also have little confidence in people's accounts of spiritual experiences. When discussing such cases with me, they tend to describe the person as likely to be mistaken or undergoing a psychological episode. Given their starting point is that God exists, I think this is interesting. Possibly it's the most appropriate default starting point whether you're a theist or an atheist.
  • J
    1.9k
    Well, atheists I know would not say, as you write, “there isn’t any personal god.”Tom Storm

    You know nicer atheists than I do! :smile:

    such experiences rely on subjective testimonyTom Storm

    I don't think this is the heart of the problem. We routinely accept subjective testimony about all sorts of things, if by "testimony" you mean merely "Here is what I saw/heard/tasted/thought." Rather, the problem is the explanatory value, as you say here:

    experiences that, while meaningful to the individual, could have multiple naturalistic explanations and thus can't meaningfully serve as reliable evidence for the existence of a divine being.Tom Storm

    An alleged mystical experience can indeed have multiple explanations, just as an experience of romantic love can. The atheist can allow the experience, on a purely descriptive level; what they draw the line at is the explanation. They don't believe -- and I think they're right not to -- that any experience can be completely "self-credentialing." I can't claim that my experience of X includes as part of that experience the knowledge of what caused the experience. At best, we draw the most plausible conclusions.

    And this leads to the other point that the atheist wants to insist on -- your use of the phrase "naturalistic explanations." I think that, for most atheists, non-naturalistic explanations are ruled out a priori. But if we don't do this, and simply talk about "multiple possible explanations" among which could be explanations based on an encounter with God, then at least the "God explanation" can join the other contenders and be weighed for its plausibility just like any other.
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