p13prax

The Pragmatic Proof of Deity

By John Taylor; 2008 Feb 13, 07 Mulk, 164 BE

Today Peter and I are scheduled to speak at Mrs. Javid's on the proofs of deity, though at this point the weather looks like it may intervene. In any case I want to sum up some of the changes and additions that I have made to the slide show over the past couple of days. One important point is that the so-called "new atheists" are not so new. I came across the following statement by Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism. Burke said this during the French Revolution, which had been inspired over the previous several decades by a cabal of atheists and deists calling themselves "Les Philosophes," or philosophers.

"I hear on all hands that a cabal calling itself philosophic receives the glory of many of the late proceedings, and that their opinions and systems are the true actuating spirit of the whole of them. I have heard of no party in England, literary or political, at any time, known by such a description.

"It is not with you composed of those men, is it, whom the vulgar in their blunt, homely style commonly call atheists and infidels? If it be, I admit that we, too, have had writers of that description who made some noise in their day. At present they repose in lasting oblivion. Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers? Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through? Ask the booksellers of London what is become of all these lights of the world. In as few years their few successors will go to the family vault of "all the Capulets".
“But whatever they were, or are, with us, they were and are wholly unconnected individuals.
“With us they kept the common nature of their kind and were not gregarious. They never acted in corps or were known as a faction in the state, nor presumed to influence in that name or character, or for the purposes of such a faction, on any of our public concerns. Whether they ought so to exist and so be permitted to act is another question. As such cabals have not existed in England, so neither has the spirit of them had any influence in establishing the original frame of our constitution or in any one of the several reparations and improvements it has undergone.
“The whole has been done under the auspices, and is confirmed by the sanctions, of religion and piety.
“The whole has emanated from the simplicity of our national character and from a sort of native plainness and directness of understanding, which for a long time characterized those men who have successively obtained authority amongst us. This disposition still remains, at least in the great body of the people." (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, November 1790, at: <http://www.mdx.ac.uk/WWW/STUDY/xburke.htm>)

I cannot emphasize enough my agreement with Burke on this matter. Unbelievers presuming to call themselves "Philosophes" is an offense to the very word philosophy -- as I point out later in the section on the Baha'i principle of the equality of the sexes, the very word philosopher means "lover of Sophia," or wisdom. The word wisdom or Sophia in Greek refers to the female attributes of God, love, compassion, mercy and other motherly, nurturing qualities. Socrates coined this term when trying to explain his mission in the Apology. His role as gadfly to the state of Athens could only be called "philosophy" because he did not claim to know or understand anything, far less God. This is impossible in any conscious, direct or "male" way. So instead Socrates took on the female attributes of God by offering what is now called a pragmatic proof of deity. That is, he walked the path known as the Via Negativa, he acted out his belief that knowledge, even knowledge of God through the Being he called his "daemon," can be demonstrated by attempting to prove one's own ignorance. The more we show forth the fact that we are humble servants of God, the greater our understanding and influence. In Christ's terms, we must lose our life in order to gain it.

I also added a couple of slides on a book the kids and I just read for our children's class, called "Discovering the Moon," which is about the Long Obligatory Prayer, that is, the "moon" of God's religion -- the sun being the 19 day long Fast coming up next month. Since I have taken on the project of saying the Long Oblig every other day, I have come to understand the value of this pragmatic proof of deity. True, this is a proof that Baha'is share with other faiths, but it is such an important proof that I would be negligent not to mention it. Ultimately, the pragmatic proof, living the life of God in order to prove He can move, is the most important, indeed perhaps the only way that a hard-core, cynical atheist is ever going to come to faith.

I also added a fascinating contemporary satirical cartoon of Burke looking over the shoulder of a radical English clergyman who sympathized with the ideals of the Revolution by the name of Dr. Richard Price. Here is the explanation of the caricature given on the blog, written by an atheist, where I found several of my latest illustrations for the talk,

"Although originally a Whig and a supporter of the American Revolution, statesman and celebrated orator Edmund Burke warned that the French Revolution would lead to the collapse of order and an outbreak of regicide and atheism. Reduced here to a pair of peering spectacles, a prying nose, and a pair of tiny hands wielding a crown and a crucifix, Burke split with the Whigs and by 1792 had allied himself with the Tory leader, William Pitt. The rat upon whom Burke spies is the Dissenting, radical clergyman Dr. Richard Price. Gillray (the cartoonist) imagines Price at work on an imaginary essay "On the Benefits of Anarchy, Regicide, Atheism," with a picture of the execution of Charles I hanging over his desk. Price's actual sermon before the reformist Revolution Society, which praised the French Revolution and its ideals of liberty, and championed an elective monarchy, provoked Burke to write Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)."

I think this split between Price and Burke is, in microcosm, the sign of a "Great Divorce" between religion and liberalism that characterizes the West to this day. On the one hand, religion fumbles the ball by rejecting global solutions and sinking into reactionary, exclusivist obscurantism. On the other, science and the learned refuse to recognize the potential benefits of faith, even in effecting their own ends.

This split has widened to a chasm today. This is why I think it is beneficial to think back and look upon that radical clergyman Price in the light of what we know today. On one hand, he was right, the prospect of liberty, fraternity and equality on a world level, transcending national and parochial boundaries, is a glorious one. All religions should embrace them, especially in view of the fact that they are ultimately derived from the highest teachings of their own Founders. On the other, the brutal fact is that these "enlightenment values" were then and still are appropriated by cynical atheists and used as an excuse to exploit their fellow man. Burke rightly saw the evil in this, the first Great Lie (Hitler's Great Lie was only a more developed version of the same lie). Burke rightly predicted the terror to come. One slide is of a contemporary painting a public beheading, one of ten thousand that took place during the terror. It is well to remember that the word "terrorist" was invented at this time, and it did not refer to rogue elements but to the atheist government that oversaw the routine cruelty of "Le Terreur." How ironic it is that the Republican Party, whose intellectual muscle is formed by atheistic capitalist ideologues, is presently obsessed with the politics of fear of terrorists. Again, a cynical lie instantiated in bloody policy. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the present atheistic capitalists with their brutal, self-interested world-embracing economic policies are responsible for the homelessness and disenfranchisement of over a billion people, a crime that threatens to dwarf the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges and the “excesses” of the French Revolution put together. Terrorists indeed.

An important argument for the existence of God is to be found in Abdu'l-Baha's Secret of Divine Civilization. Although it was written to exclusivist Muslims in Iran, it also addresses questions of science, progress, reason and reasoned faith. Religion, He says, is a sort of virtue machine that churns out willingness to sacrifice on the part of individuals who otherwise would never do so. This is of incalculable benefit to society, the Master, the Master points out in the following section:

"It is religion, to sum up, which produces all human virtues, and it is these virtues which are the bright candles of civilization. If a man is not characterized by these excellent qualities, it is certain that he has never attained to so much as a drop out of the fathomless river of the waters of life that flows through the teachings of the Holy Books, nor caught the faintest breath of the fragrant breezes that blow from the gardens of God; for nothing on earth can be demonstrated by words alone, and every level of existence is known by its signs and symbols, and every degree in man's development has its identifying mark." (Abdu'l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, 98-99)

Note especially the last sentence here, where the Master all but spells out the pragmatic proof of deity -- words alone do not suffice, we have to act out God in our lives, and the results of our piety then shine out like the sun demonstrating God to the three most skeptical parties of all, me, myself and I. This brings me back to Baha’u’llah’s comparison of the fast to the sun and the oblig to the moon. Why is only one month, Ala', sunny, while all the other eighteen months of the Badi' year are illuminated only by the moon?

Clearly, because life in this world of contingency is a dark, shadowy affair, subject to accidents and change.

Most of the time, most of the year, we are in darkness. We are creatures of the half-light, and we have only the moon of that prayer to guide our steps. Those precious moments saying the long oblig are unspeakably sacred, especially for me. I love them because that is when I am proving God, to myself and to others. This is so important to me because there is nothing a religious person can say to an atheist that they cannot understand and still reject, should they choose to do so. This is because any higher, spiritual reality is willed, gotten by choice, desired. Without love, all is as the tinkling of bells. If they do not choose to act out faith by literally going through the motions, performing the ablutions and then genuflections of the oblig, there is not much that can be done. But if we Baha'is, who have accepted Baha'u'llah, do not go through the motions either, then we deserve the defeat that is waiting for us. For all that is left are mere words.

While it is true that each of the Baha'i principles is a new, unique and unprecedented proof of God, they all depend upon the pragmatic proof of deity. That is because, as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out,

"Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it."

That is, the Baha'i principles are known and understood but they are still in any real sense completely undiscovered. For example, we all know that search for truth on the part of everybody is probably a good idea, but that is very different from having that at the center of your religious faith. Same thing for oneness of humanity and all the other principles. These are religious teachings that have to be treated pragmatically, applying the pragmatic proof of deity.