ePhilo2
By John Taylor; 2008 Jan 01, 02 Sharaf, 164 BE
Announcements of Upcoming Events
More Discussion with ePhilo
Here are the upcoming Wednesday night firesides at Mrs. Javid's home in Flamborough. If you live in the area, please distribute this information to your community.
All are welcome to come investigate the Baha'i Faith every Wednesday evening at
The following is the text of the poster for our talk in Dunnville on the 9th
Baha'i Discussion Series (Dunnville)
Is there a God, or what?
Is there a God? How do we know? What proves that He exists? What does not? The Baha'i proofs of deity differ radically from earlier attempts to answer these questions.
Presenters are Peter Gardner, prominent personality on one of the Internet's highest-traffic discussion groups, Theism Debate, and blogger John Taylor (badiblog.blogspot.com), co-coordinator of the Wainfleet Philosopher's Cafe.
Garfield Disher Room,
Dunnville Branch of the Haldimand Public Library
More Discussion with ePhilo
I want to include some of the discussion with ePhilo about atheism and the proofs of deity. Not all is in order. In fact it is so pellmell, what with comments and digressions and delays, that I am confused about what is going on and who said what when. But that is normal for me, especially in this rainy, migraine weather. But first I want to include two perceptive letters to the editor by the same fellow, one Ron Partridge of England, that I found sum up my feeling that Baha'is are sidelined by much of the atheist-theist debate.
Religion, rural clergy and the future of faith
Why is it that so many sceptical scientific writers on religion miss the point? Lewis Wolpert says that religion is a by-product of the human drive to devise causal explanations for everything around us (The ideas interview, G2, April 11). But its main motives and power lie elsewhere.
Religion is about identity, value, purpose, culture and social cohesion. Trying to explain the origins of humanity and the world around us are almost incidental to these main themes.
We want to know that our being here has value and significance, even if only transitory. We want to know the meaning of our identity, the shape it should take for the greatest fulfillment, and the place this gives us within our families, communities and peoples. If individuals place their hopes in a particular faith, the importance of what is at stake will lead them to safeguard whatever else they find within the repository of its traditions.
People do not subscribe to a literal interpretation of Genesis for the sake of explanation; they do so to safeguard the authority of their own biblically based vision of human meaning and purpose. Liberal Christians believe that the validity of their faith does not involve holding on to these explanations. Stories of the creation are indeed stages in our drive to explain things to ourselves, but faith itself is about something else.
Ron Partridge,
Religions' Roles Scientific American Magazine -
The dialogue between Lawrence M. Krauss and Richard Dawkins on religion in Should Science Speak to Faith? is almost as frustrating as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell discussing cosmology. Both authors seem to assume that Christian fundamentalism provides a paradigm for all religion, which is sufficiently defined by its collision with biology and cosmology. Other faiths and Christian groups have never had such problems with science.
Religion is also about purpose, value and identity, the meaning of existence, the significance of human life, and the critique of our moral values. Slavery was abolished when Christians finally understood its incompatibility with their teachings. And if religion has known sin, so have science and atheism. Ask J. Robert Oppenheimer and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Ron Partridge,
And now, on to the JET ePhilo debate about the existence of God. We started off talking about the "dream proof" of deity, as laid out by the Master in the latest talk featured here on the Badi' Blog. At one point ePhilo brought up some dreams about a gorilla that he had lately.
==========
JET: As a former atheist the topics of atheism and the proofs of deity often come up on my blog, badiblog.blogspot.com, and your questions will no doubt inspire longer attempts at answers there.
ePhilo: I'd like to read it. I did take a look at your blog last night and couldn't find much specifically about this topic... let me know, and feel free to use whatever details you find appropriate.
ePhilo: A few years ago, I went to a presentation ... sort of a Baha'i 101. A gal there, someone I've seen around at other meetings, said in regard to the unity/harmony of science and religion that she likes the Baha'i faith, because "you don't have to check your brain at the door." My thought after talking to T-- was that maybe you don't *have* to check your brain, but some people do anyway. But then to find out that this idea comes from Baha'u'llah himself... what am I supposed to think? For starters, I find this argument utterly unconvincing. Within the last few weeks, I've had some interesting dreams. In one, I was watching a gorilla give a lecture on some scholarly topic. I remember looking very closely at the gorilla in an attempt to figure out whether it was a very articulate gorilla or a very realistic gorilla suit. Am I supposed to believe that this is my soul traveling to another part of the world? We don't even have to discuss the fact that there are no documented cases of dreams giving us *new* information. New insight, perhaps, but not new information. If Baha'u'llah says this, how can there be harmony of science and religion?
JET: `Abdu'l-Baha compared prayer to a wireless telegraph station to an unseen world. Both Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha put this "dream as proof" at the center of their apologetics. But usually they used it as proof of the soul and Spirit, rather than of God.
ePhilo: I forget what I told you. Tom did seem to be talking more about the dualistic belief in a spirit or soul, and not so much about the existence of God. I've got to say, I find this all very strange. Part of me thinks I ought to just drop the subject before I say something which might come off as rude or tempt you to go on the defensive. Still, I'm interested in discussing this.
JET: I have been reading several recent books about music and the brain lately, and my impression is that the better we come to understand how brains work in detail, the more explanatory power this analogy has. They used to think that music only is involved in some organs of the brain. We now know that music affects both sides of the brain, not just the right side; they found that when musicians learn to read music, the left brain starts to react as well.
==========
ePhilo: Our minds did not evolve to help us understand science, but to help our ancestors avoid being eaten by tigers or starving to death. As a result, we have an intuitive sense about things which is often contrary to science. For example, we have a sense that when you push something, you give it some "oomph" which it slowly loses. Thus, we have a hard time initially accepting
ePhilo: Reading now (somewhat quickly) through the passages you sent, I wonder whether the point is not that we're seeing this world, but another world. I'm still left with the same question --what is with the gorilla?
JET: So anyway, in answer to your question as to how food can "cause" dreams, I would say that since brains work biochemically, the chemicals in your food may act like flipping the dial of a radio. Sometimes you get static, or meaningless conversation, and sometimes you get transmissions that really mean something to you. The point is that you do not know, and like anything else you have to use the scientific method and filter out a lot of nonsense, and even when you think you know, maybe you do not. The Baha'i Faith, being scientific does not promise anything beyond provisional certainty for such things.
==========
JET: Abdu'l-Baha, following Aristotle, said there are four basic ways we know anything, one through sense impressions, two through reason, three through tradition or scripture, and four by intuition. Plus, he posited a rare fifth criterion, what He calls the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He suggested that when we doubt the validity of a personal experience like a dream or voice, that we subject it to a combination of these criteria, and if it is confirmed by most or all then we can be fairly certain.
ePhilo: This makes sense to me, but you'd think that if real messages were being received, there'd be some sort of empirical evidence. Even if the information received were about a different world, there should be some kind of empirical corroboration available.
JET: I am not sure what you mean by empirical. If you mean experiential, the personal, subjective experience of dreaming can be as intimate and forceful as outer, worldly experiences, at least while it lasts. If you mean empirical in the sense of a repeatable experiment, it is true that one cannot repeat dreams at will, but few experiences we have while awake are repeatable in every detail either.
ePhilo: I am not sure what I mean by empirical either. I guess I mean something we can observe using objective measures, rather than hearsay and subjective experience.
ePhilo: An example of such corroboration would be if you were to e-mail me and tell me of a dream where you met me in the Dream World and had a conversation about A, B, and C ... on the same day that I had had a similar dream about you.
JET: I see your point. But there is not a problem communicating with equals, other people, or those lower on the scale, like your cat or plants. Problems come up when communication goes the other way, for example when humans try to understand God, who is by definition incomprehensible.
ePhilo: Perhaps, but my point was that (the local Baha'i) Tom thought that the existence of dreams suggests that our soul travels to other places and sees these places. If we can't ever go back while we're awake to verify what we saw, how do we know we're not just ... well.. dreaming it all up?
JET: While not every dream leads to new knowledge, several major scientific discoveries were acknowledged by their discoverers to have come from a dream.
ePhilo: This is insight, not new knowledge. It's even portrayed as such on the page you mention.
JET: As for new data, often new information is less important than insight and overviews, which is of the nature of spiritual knowledge. This is why I believe that before asking how we know God, we first must ask how we know anything at all, or, more to the point, how we can know any person at all. When we are sure about this we can then proceed to the question of whether we know God or not."
ePhilo: I agree fully. While we accept many truths on hearsay (such as the existence of cousins we've never met), but I will suggest that this is only because we *can* go verify directly if we needed to or wanted to. You might be a robot -- I don't think so -- but at any rate, I'm sure you exist because of direct experience.
JET: This is the big difficulty with spiritual experience, that we are dealing with communications not just with anybody but with a superior Intelligence. God tests us, we do not test Him. Nonetheless, God says "ask and it shall be given unto you." This does call for, in a sense, the use of the scientific method. I suggest being "empirical" by asking God for an answer to a question. Not a trivial, frivolous, insolent question, but something worthy of a superior Being. Like the meaning of life, or whatever. Try it out and let me know if you get anything from your dreams or reflections after that...
ePhilo: It's not that I haven't had religious experiences. I have. What's odd is that I continue to have them even after I stopped believing in God. I stopped believing, in large part, because I was able to step back and evaluate these experiences from the outside and found no support. I had to conclude that they're coming from the same source as the talking gorilla or the more recent dream that I had left Amelia on the porch overnight. I also can't think of anything I'd want to ask God right now.
ePhilo: I find progressive revelation one of the most attractive aspects of the Baha'i Faith. I think there is an extent to which it sets itself up for failure, though, when it claims to be the *final* manifestation.
JET: The idea of progressive revelation is laid out in the Book of Certitude by Baha'u'llah, which even if I were not a Baha'i I would still think is one of the most important works in the history of ideas. Baha'u'llah does not claim finality for His revelation, at least not after a minimum thousand years have passed. His message of unity is one that will take us a while to grasp, hence the respite. In fact He predicts that the next Manifestation will suffer terribly from our rejection.
ePhilo: That's interesting. Do I correctly understand, though, that the Baha'i faith excludes the possibility that a new manifestation will turn up, say in South America 20 years from now to unify the partial truths (with the idea that the Universal House of Justice has devolved to a partial truth)?
JET: Baha'u'llah does not claim finality for His revelation, at least not after a minimum thousand years have passed. His message of unity is one that will take us a while to grasp, hence the respite. In fact He predicts that the next Manifestation will suffer terribly from our rejection.
ePhilo: In our discussion so far, I postulated two kinds of God which I see as compatible with my understanding of the facts. Neither one was compatible with the Baha'i faith, Roman Catholicism, liberal Christianity, Islam, or any other religion I know of.
JET: I read what you said about those two kinds of God, but I cannot find the quote at the moment. As I recall, one was the deist god (the clockmaker who winds it all up and leaves it alone) and the other was an ambush god, who gets back at us when we die. Were you implying that you believe in such a god, or take such a belief to be the most reasonable of theisms? If so, your philosopher of choice would be Spinoza. ... Were you implying that you believe in such a god, or take such a belief to be the most reasonable of theisms?
ePhilo: Neither. I believe that these are the only Gods which would leave no trace on the natural world. They are the only Gods not within the domain of science. I don't find either one reasonable. I find it more reasonable to deny science and to believe in the God of the Bible.
JET: Baha'is agree with atheists in one respect: we hold that direct access to knowledge of God is impossible because He is inherently unknowable.
ePhilo: In what way is that anything more than mystical double-talk; something meant to sound good, yet containing no real substance? Incomprehensible I can take, but what does "unknowable" even mean in practice?
==========
JET: atheist regimes have ... not been exactly improvements over the violent, power-mad theocracies.
ePhilo: The very simple response are the words - power corrupts - and it's no less true for being cliche.
JET: So you concede that power corrupts atheists as well as believers?
ePhilo: Yes.
JET: If so, what solution to the problems of the world do atheists offer, other than getting rid of religion?
ePhilo: It should be kept in mind that "atheism" is not a movement or a religion. Therefore, it cannot offer anything. This is a question we need to ask of humanism, or world pantheism, or other true atheistic "isms". I imagine a similar question could be asked of Esperantists -- what solution do they offer other than a neutral language. As a group, none, but as individuals and as parts of other movements, quite a bit.
JET: Or is that (getting rid of religion) the solution? Will getting rid of God stop global warming?
ePhilo: Obviously not, but neither will encouraging religion. One might, however, wonder why we should bother fixing it if Jesus is coming back, or if in the end, we're going to leave this earth and live in some Afterlife somewhere where global warming isn't a problem. At best, religion is irrelevant to global warming.
==========
ePhilo: I routinely encounter shock when I identify as an Atheist -- as if that's another word for "baby eater." There is no data to suggest that individual atheists are less moral than their religious counterparts, and in fact, there is a fair amount of data to suggest that people decide right and wrong independently of their religious beliefs.
JET: I agree that there is a lot of prejudice against atheists, especially here in
ePhilo: It didn't really come up in
==========
ePhilo: My impression of the letter-to-the-editor which you sent is that the author(s) were sitting there at home thinking "Hey, this can't possibly apply to me, I'm reasonable." -- like the Pharasee of Luke 18:11. "I thank thee, oh Editor, that I am not a Fundamentalist or a publican." He should be smiting his breast, re-reading the discussion while saying to himself "be merciful on me, a believer."
JET: Surely the whole point of the Parable of the Publican that you mention is that we should be humble and try to improve ourselves while refraining from holding the beliefs of others in open contempt. Be careful not to fall into Dawkin's trap, of intolerantly attacking others' intolerance.
JET: When Dawkins holds that belief in God is inherently wrong, a false delusion, he has a right to that opinion ... If we think an error is being made we should point it out, but there is a difference between that and denigration of others' beliefs, practices and values. What is the difference between saying another faith is from the devil and calling all religions virulent memes?
JET Be careful not to fall into Dawkin's trap, of intolerantly attacking others' intolerance.
ePhilo: I don't think I've crossed that line. I still think that people who think that his writings don't apply to them have missed his point.
JET: What is the difference between saying another faith is from the devil and calling all religions virulent memes?
ePhilo: Err, the latter is empirically verifiable? :-) I'll say again that since "meme" is more or less a fancy word for "idea" or "set of ideas", all knowledge are memes. Calling all religions memes should not be the least bit controversial. What is controversial is calling them false memes or unproductive memes.
JET: As for atheists being the "niggers of the Western world," I thought Esperantists had that honour... :)
ePhilo: If I mention that I speak Esperanto, I get asked what that is and the I get a few polite smiles. When I say I'm an atheist, I get any of a host of shocked responses.
"Ha ha, funny joke."
"But you're raising your children with values."
"Wait, stop everything -- how can you be an Atheist".
"I respect that - you're going to hell."
(That last one from a fundamentalist who really believes in hell. It was funny at the time, but I'm forced to ask -- if hell is real, when is it ever a joking matter?)
No comments:
Post a Comment