ePhilo IV

More Conversation with ePhilo

By John Taylor; 2008 Jan 12, 13 Sharaf, 164 BE

My goal this morning is to gather together as many loose ends from the ongoing dialog with ePhilo as I can. I am not covering everything, just what is of interest to Badi' blog readers. So, here goes.

ePhilo: I might be tempted to agree with you on the benefits of planning -- especially concerning two pie-in-the-sky concepts: Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) and Plants For a Future (PFAF) - try a web search on these if you run out of things to keep you thinking. I still don't see much "proof", though, nor that planning requires God. ... nor that the Baha'i Faith is categorically different from other faiths....

JET: I will look into the "pie-in-the-sky" concepts you mention. That is just down my alley. I have been thinking about why I even mentioned this "planning God" ... I surely did not expect it to prove God to the non-believer! What was I thinking? No, really, what was I thinking? Now I am starting to lean this way: the Master in the climactic November of His time in America pointed out that the dozen odd principles He had been explicating during the entire time were all new to the Baha'i Faith. The greatest of these, He explained, was the principle of the covenant. No other major world religion has a written charter, authentic and straight from the founder. Probably my inchoate idea of a "planning God" is this Most Great Baha'i principle, covenant, adapted as a proof of deity. Just after the Master's Western journeys, He turned covenant into a plan with a series of letters to North America called the "Tablets of the Divine Plan." Thus the most great principle set into motion what I think right is surely the most persuasive proof of God, the fact that if we want to know what to do to further His will right here and now, we need only look at the specific requirements of the latest charter of the UHJ, right now it is a Five Year Plan. It will do some experimentation in upcoming talks to test the cogency of this speculation, and I may not think exactly this way a year from now.

 ePhilo (in response to "Cow Philosophers"): Bless the Bovine!  That's what I'm teaching my kids to say when they see something which surprises and impresses them.  For some reason, expressions starting with "holy" (including "Holy Cow!") are not permitted at their school.  Unfortunately, their mother has them convinced that blessings are also forbidden at public school, so they are reluctant to play along with my word play.

 JET: Wow! Around here teachers have problems keeping profanity out of the mouths of children, and your children's teachers are even working on mild expletives like holy this and that! And blessings too! I know Hindus are insulted by that expression "holy cow," since cows really are holy to them, but all other holies too? That is a stretch. But then again, Jesus did say, "Let your yea's be yea and your nays be nay." It is irreligious to invoke higher authority as an intensifier.

 ePhilo: I do like Baha'u'llah's analogy here -- that evolution is comparable to embryonic development -- but since cats and humans do share a common ancestor, the logical conclusion of this analogy is that cats are human too.

 JET: My computer may have a common tool ancestor with the hammer in my garage but that does not mean it makes any sense for me to call it a hammer and start driving nails with it. Computers, endowed with software, have reached a level of complexity, adaptability and usefulness that transcends any of their antecedents in the world of tools.

 This is in no way to prejudice or insult to either cats or humans, it is just a statement of facts. If cats or any other creature suddenly started talking, inventing and showing other signs of transcendent ability, it would be a different situation.

 ePhilo: Se la Bahaa Dieca Afero estas nekonebla, kial la Bahaanoj penas koni Lin? (If for Baha'is the divine is unknowable, why do Baha'is strive to know it?) Kiel eblas vidi (kiel vidiris) ion nekoneblan? (How is it possible to see, as you said, something unknowable?)

 JET: It is unknowable directly, but it can be known virtually, as an image in a mirror. The mirror is the Manifestation of God, in our age, that is Baha'u'llah. This is explained very clearly in the Kitab-i-Iqan, by Baha'u'llah. At one point you said, as born-againers do, that "this is all coming from men," as if that were a refutation. It surely makes sense that God comes and communicates to us in human form. If we were shaped like teapots, it would be unfair of God not to reflect himself in the form of a teapot so that we could understand His will in the way we can best relate to.

 ePhilo: "When I was a believer, my favorite pastor was fond of pointing out the etymological connection between "agnostic" and "ignoramus." Myself, I prefer the older definition of agnosticism -- that nobody CAN know whether God does not exist. When we use the word (agnostic) today, we often mean "I am not sure." If you want to define terms, these two kinds of agnosticism should be kept separate.

 JET: Agnostic is also related to gnostic, an experience of gnosis, or secret, elite, mystic knowledge. Baha'is are probably closer to agnostics than gnostics, since Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha eschewed obscurantism and held that in order for God to be fair and just, everyone needs to have adequate access to the divine message. Thus the only true Gnostic is the Manifestation of God, and Abdu'l-Baha (entitled: Serru'llah, Mystery of God) and nobody else.

 ePhilo: For the record, while I accept that science cannot prove a universal negative, I reject the notion that God is unknowable and outside the realm of science.

 JET: Um, which explains why you are an atheist. If I thought God squeezed himself into a small enough ball to fit inside His creation, I would be every bit as much an atheist as you. Such a God would be a god and as worthy of belief as fairies or the Floating Spaghetti Monster. The sad fact is that atheists have such an easy time of it with modern Christians because the latter really are not monotheists, they are henotheists; the incomprehensible doctrines of Sonship and the trinity, as the Qu'ran repeatedly points out, booted them out of the ranks of monotheists, and indeed the ranks of rationalists as well.

 ePhilo: A truly wise man, empowered by God, especially one who is working on the assumption that he's on a mission for the whole world for centuries to come, would take steps to ensure that his message is preserved for the generations - yet as you point out in your blog, Jesus left us no scriptures.

 JET: The standard Baha'i explanation is that Jesus did not aim to establish justice but love and spirit. He succeeded in what He set out to do; there is more than enough in the Gospels to learn how to love others and understand that Spirit guides human creativity. If you look at the history, the fact that His Teaching survived at all is amazing. Look at the stupendous obstacles it faced... Yet Christians today hold that He not only wanted to preserve it for generations, but that every jot and tittle of it stands forever, totally unalterable. That is just perverted. As Jesus warned, the Sabbath is for man, not man for the Sabbath.

 ePhilo: The focus in Atheist literature on this "narrow subset" is mostly the result of the political climate in the US and in other English-speaking countries, but it doesn't mean that other groups are off the hook. If Baha'u'llah had come to correct two millennia of apostasy, that would be one thing, but He came to *unify* the religions, so that's another. While He clearly disagrees with details of Christian doctrine, He largely affirms Christianity and Christ's mission, does he not? If it turns out that Jesus did not exist, where does this leave Baha'u'llah?

 JET: The so-called fundamentalist values his truth above human life, in other words for him man really is for the Sabbath. Baha'is side with Jesus' teaching that religious law, the Sabbath, is created for our own good, and that if it stands in the way of benefit, it is best discarded. The true neighbor is the Good Samaritan, the one who acts for good, not the doctrinally correct priest who walked by indifferent to the dire needs of humanity. If a group who calls themselves I do not care what, Satanists, Goths, whatever, if they are out there helping the poor, doing good in the world, and your group, I do not care what they call themselves, Christians, Baha'is, if they are harping on about how important it is to follow the minutiae of Sabbath law, or whatever theory is in their heads at the time, then a true believer in God has no choice but to join those doing real good, the Satanists, Goths, or whatever they call themselves.

 ePhilo: I'm really trying to give these proofs a fair shake, but I can't get past the thought that all that Baha'u'llah is saying in his PD talks is "Plants cannot know that people exist, therefore God exists."

 His was a more general point, the lower cannot understand the higher, by definition. This also is a point that Jesus touched on when He said, "Physician, heal thyself." It is actually illegal for a doctor to treat himself or family members, because even if he has more medical know-how than the attending physician, he will never have the objectivity to be sure of what he sees. This actually happened a decade or so in Burlington, Ontario. A woman doctor insisted on treating her 12 year old daughter with some sort of alternative medicine that she was convinced would help, but it killed the girl. As a result, charges were laid against the mother. It is not a question of the amount of knowledge, but of the ability to see from outside. Only our Creator is qualified to teach us about certain things, and, as the Iqan points out, in order to prove the divine qualifications of God's Messenger, God intentionally singles out the least likely, the least qualified from a human point of view. For Moses, God picked a slave and a murderer, in Jesus it was an illiterate outcast Jew, for Baha'u'llah it was, well, an Iranian.

 Scott Adams (quoted in JET's blog entry last year): Religious people are happier, they live longer, have fewer accidents, and stay out of trouble compared to nonreligious people.

 ePhilo: That's a good point ... but is it true?  If it were, would that suggest that God is real? If it does, is God anything more than a metaphor?

 You have hit the nail on the head, as far as the Baha'i Faith is concerned. One of the best papers (later a book) on the Faith's position that I came across is by John Hatcher, called "The Metaphorical Nature of Reality." That is how Baha'is (and to some extent Muslims) get around the potential conflict with science and the superstition that God could or would ever oppose Himself. Everything in nature that we see or experience has meaning for us as a metaphor for God. We can and will never gain direct access to Him.

 I am auditing a book that you and several others recommended, Mere Christianity, by CS Lewis.

 ePhilo: You have said (and also quoted others saying) here that Atheists seem to focus on a "narrow subset of Christianity, and that moderate believers - Baha'is especially - feel left out. If a believer ever feels that way, he should look more closely at what is being said. ... One may disagree with me in detail, but all believers, when reading Atheist literature should not be so quick to assume that they're talking about someone else.

 ePhilo: Speaking for myself, I would not respond this way, but rather: One: Truth is better than a mistruth (and I believe the existence of God to be a mistruth.)

 JET: The idea and ability to value truth are bound up in the concept of God. Nonetheless, if it were true that God did not exist, or even if God's faith were doing harm, it would, to cite Abdu'l-Baha almost directly, be a pious act to reject religion and throw it in the dustbin of history. Such is the holiness and integrity of atheism, so to speak.

 ePhilo: Two: the benefits of religion are not founded in the existence of God (since God does not exist), and therefore can be had another way -- indeed, they ARE had other ways.

 JET: Yes, I am reading Sam Harris's atheist screed, "The End of Faith," and he makes this point repeatedly. Yes, no doubt psychology and other social sciences are progressing in their ability to help us, and they do take the place in counseling that priests used to take in peoples' lives. Since Baha'is have no priests, WWHHOOOSH, that passes us by with a rush. Baha'i institutions do not try to compete with scientific counseling, and individuals who come to them are usually counseled to go to a wise doctor.

 On the other hand, as Patrick Glynn points out in "God, the Evidence," psychologists over the past few decades have come full circle. In the 1960's 98 percent of shrinks were atheists, now most psychologist recognize that faith, prayer and religious commitment are not a pathology but the reverse, they are essential to normal well being and good mental hygiene. Even an atheist needs, according to his or her own lights, to take time to reflect, pray and meditate in order to be creative and bear under life's hardship.

 ePhilo: Three: Faith (belief without proof) is not a virtue, and all religions hold up faith as a virtue.

 JET: The fact is that to accomplish anything worthwhile, much less difficult or heroic, a great deal of faith is required. Take global warming. We do not know but that so many greenhouse gases may have already been released into the atmosphere that nothing can be done to reverse it. Do you know? Does any scientist or group of scientists know for sure? No. Are they going to write out a proof on a blackboard showing either that we will succeed or that we will not?

 If we are to take any action at all, we need faith first.

 We need to believe in the face of all odds that an effort will make a difference, and that it is worth taking a chance. Atheists need faith the same as anybody else. Otherwise, why not say, "Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we are going to die anyway. Just enjoy yourself, it is later than you think." Yes, you and I are going to die no matter what happens, but faith is caring for our children and the future of the human race on this planet. It is God who says, "Choose life."