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Ch. 5: The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False

#64: Mar. - May 2009 (Non-Fiction)
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Robert Tulip

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Interbane wrote:You're saying there is no god, but the idea of him is meaningful?
Exactly, except that describing God as “him” applies gender to a concept which is beyond gender.

You might recall my review of Dawkins’ Unweaving The Rainbow, where I open the idea of the trinity as a meaningful human construction, and define God as “the ultimate adaptive possibility towards which humanity must evolve if we are to fulfill our purpose in life.” This ‘possibility’ does not ‘exist’, except in the sense that other finite goals exist.

Following Spinoza and Einstein, if we define God as the universe, then the question is whether we can understand religion as presenting a path towards harmony with the universe. Hitchens quotes Einstein as saying he is religious in roughly this sense. I maintain this is a fruitful way to understand Christianity.

Dawkins, in The God Delusion, acknowledges that Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong advocates such a non-theistic Christianity, but proceeds to define Spong as not a Christian.
You elevate this meaning so much that it becomes more important than whether or not there is any truth to the writings.
Precisely. If we study the writings and find that their historical claims are false, we have the options of rejecting the writings on that basis or reinterpreting them. I choose reinterpretation.
Rationalism can tackle such questions as the meaning of love, beauty, and justice.
To which we might add, rationalism can tackle the meaning of God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Plato is the supreme rationalist in his recognition of the power of ideas, and his demand to dis-assemble popular illusions to find their actual basis. We do not say that love, beauty or justice are meaningless just because these words are not entities, and nor should we make such category mistakes with religious concepts.
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Do you consider yourself a Christian? You say god doesn't exist, and nothing of the bible should be taken literally; any meaning derived can be derived from other sources. There's nothing left! The tenuous connection of the bible being the source of your interpretations is the same as if I said 2+2=4 because McGrath-Hill said so(they are a textbook publishing company).

RT: "We do not say that love, beauty or justice are meaningless just because these words are not entities, and nor should we make such category mistakes with religious concepts."

There are no religious concepts to be examined that aren't otherwise a part of our world. Discarding and disregarding the bible, we'd have all the same concepts, albiet via a different delivery system. If the bible says "do unto others...", rationalism can analyze that. But rationalism wouldn't be analyzing the bible, it would be analyzing the moral concept which is independant of the bible. In the same light, if the bible says the sky is blue, science doesn't need the bible as a reference to analyze the sky to determine it is blue.
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johnson1010 wrote:You are asserting a divine force is present and that we must begin debates with that subject settled. I say, that that is exactly the point in contest. Either there is a supernatural entity with unlimited, complete power and dominion over everything that ever was or will be. One who made the world for our enjoyment and rewards good people, utilizing his universe-level powers to respond to our demands and improve our individual lives, and punishes the people we can’t get even with in life. For which there is no empirical evidence to be found, all proofs arising from the introspective and anthropomorphized projections of man. Or. We made it up to feel good about ourselves. One of these adds layers and layers of complex unknowable opacity, while the other deals with readily studied psychological processes observed on a daily basis throughout the animal kingdom. If you hadn’t been raised with a notion of God impregnated in your imagination from youth, as an adult, which of these solutions would be the more likely?
Hi Johnson, this is a really useful way to set out the problem. However, your depiction of God as an entity responding to selfish prayer, and religion as a feel-good device, is a straw man. Admittedly, it is a fair critique of fundamentalist prosperity theology, but that heresy is totally unbiblical. The fundamentalists have thrown so much sand in people’s eyes that you assume their reading of the Bible is the only one, when in fact they largely ignore the bible. In fact, the prophets, including Jesus, do not want people to feel good about themselves, except on the basis of a thoroughgoing critique of the evil of the world and a commitment to do something about it. Jesus does not say believers are automatically blessed in the manner of the cheap grace promoted by fundamentalism, but rather says the blessing of God is with the poor in spirit, the meek, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness. These groups are at the margins of our world.
If there is simply a creative principle, such as when conditions are right for the formation of a water molecule, the molecule does form, this does not lend itself to anything written in the bible.
But it does lend itself to a better reading of the Bible! The key texts, such as the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer and the Last Judgement, are sublime evolutionary arguments, indicating what humanity must do to avoid destruction and to understand the necessary conditions for our common humanity. The whole notion of creation can be reinterpreted in evolutionary terms, such that when conditions on our planet were right for the formation of a species with the power of abstract language, such a species evolved.
If you speak of a creative force, then why associate that with the concept of god? You burden yourself with unnecessary supernatural stories. These stories would seem to only apply if you are talking about some version of the Christian god, not a force such as electromagnetism. ... Love is powerful and what you say about its absence is true, but where do you get the concept that love exceeds the confines of the animal kingdom? Do volcanoes love? Do meteors love? Love is an evolutionary construct to ensure survival. Love does a fair job of keeping us all alive without the bible. There is no need to tie an artificial deity to the concept of love for it to work, or to be understood by the masses.
The bible defines God as love. Love is a creative force, enabling effective human engagement with reality, although restricted to the anthroposphere. Within this human biological sphere, love is just as fundamental as the forces of physics. The value of Christianity is that the story of Jesus provides a great imaginative picture of what would happen if a person lived solely for selfless love.
Hurricanes are an act of weather patterns. We know why hurricanes form. They require no god. Likewise we know how earthquakes happen, mudslides, lightning strikes, wild fires and lamp poles falling on your car. Any of these might be labeled as an act of god, but they are all events with well understood causes. Imagining they are the work of a beneficent god bears us no fruit except guilt and hysteria. Would you rather be told, that built up tectonic energy was released and caused the destruction of your home, or that God was pissed at YOU and destroyed your house by having the earth swallow it up? Understanding brings peace of mind, and perhaps the wisdom to not build on a fault line.
The issue here is about getting away from the superstitious idea of ‘God as entity’ towards the meaningful idea of ‘God as reality’, and showing that this meaningful idea is actually promoted by Saint Paul and the insurance industry. Equating ‘divine will’ and ‘the will of the universe’ means that God works through the laws of physics, not against them.
Common religious teaching is that the parable delivered in the bible are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. Based on this, the metaphysical claims of religion are false.
Agreed, this metaphysical claim regarding biblical inerrancy is false, as can easily be shown by the internal contradictions of the bible and its use of impossible miracles. However, your inference regarding all metaphysical claims of religion is totally invalid. Logically, it amounts to saying ‘Some people falsely claim that X leads to Y, therefore Y is false,’ or ‘Some claims about Y are false, therefore all claims about Y are false’. In this general case, Y can have all sorts of basis other than the false X. We do not use the falsity of flat earth theory to deduce that other planets do not exist. Rather, we look at the incorrect inferences of the flat earth theorists, for example on epicycles, to understand what the actuality was that they were trying to describe. We can do the same with biblical parables.
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law (the Old Testament) or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke or a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law (the Old Testament) until everything is accomplished. (Matthew 5:17-18)" Could this not be viewed as explicit backing of the old testament and all it entails? Does this not just illustrate that the writings are contradictory, and therefore not the product of divine inspiration, and one mind working to build a source of ultimate truth?
Yes, I thought about this obvious rejoinder which directly contradicts the ‘love your enemies’ line and provides a basis for fundamentalist inerrancy doctrine. It is a bit like the two contradictory creation stories in Genesis, which seem to indicate rival traditions jostling for attention and accepting an unstable compromise. There was a political agenda of making Christianity acceptable to Judaism, and it could be the ‘no iota’ line got slipped in despite its implications. However, we could also speculate that fulfilment of the law meant its transformation into something new, building upon it as a foundation.
If it is only a parable, and one found to be faulty in many respects, why should it dominate any moral agenda? Why should anyone live their lives by a parable?
I agree with you that conservative Christianity is flawed as a moral system. One glaring example raised by Hitchens is the culpability of the Roman Catholic Church associated with the Rwanda genocide. However, this baggage does not invalidate alternative readings.

The main parable I read in the Bible is that our species is on a path to extinction and needs to shift the basis of behaviour from instinct to reason in order to establish a world civilization. We could read Revelation 18, the destruction of Babylon, as a parable for 911, or even read Revelation 13, the 666, as a parable for Ronald Wilson Reagan and the United States Dollar. Such readings need not imply that the biblical writers predicted these events, but could nonetheless open up a dialogue about how we understand God.
In any case when we look at the bible and read what it says we can see that what is written there is not empirically correct. If we take a point of view like what you express, that the bible is a sort of, I guess “interpretive” way of understanding god then we have already imposed a filter over what is written to try to shoe-horn it into sensibility. If it were right there would be little need to interpret it, or explain away the many contradictions. If we keep it as just a moral lesson, then we would put it on the same level as tales by the Brothers Grimm with not greater hold on the ultimate truths than any other, and it should hold no grip on us other than its merit as a story device.
There is not really any alternative to an interpretative reading, given that the literal reading is contradictory and false. However, the Bible does speak of more ultimate themes than the Brothers Grimm, who cover practical moral warnings rather than mytho-poetic existential themes of world politics. For example, considering Tom Harpur’s reading of the story of Lazarus as a retelling of the Egyptian story of Osiris, the parable of Dives and Lazarus could be read as a prediction of the ultimate triumph of the cyclical vision of time in Egyptian mythology over the linear logic of Roman imperialism.
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Robert Tulip wrote: There is an immense amount of deconstruction required to clear away the distractions of dominant false interpretation.
Deconstruction or destruction? Either way, I'm reminded of an awful Amercian TV show I hope we haven't exported to Australia. In "Extreme Makeover, Home Edition," the crew "renovates" some hapless family's home. In actuality, they alter it beyond recognition or even tear it down and replace it with something opulent and gadget-filled.
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Seeing your counterpoints clarifies your position to me Robert.

Now given that you are not speaking as though any portion of the bible is literally true, but to be understood as metaphorical, why is this particular text of any greater value than the works of thousands of other prescient writers?

Are you simply making a case that we should not abandon the writings of the bible all together, or that it should still have a place of honor in our culture, summarily trumping other sources?

it almost seems that you may have formulated an alternative view of morality and then retro-actively imposed it on the barbaric lunacy of the bible. Wouldn't you be doing yourself a favor by abandoning this text and making your own way?

Are you making a case that there should be an effort to turn people's familiarity with the bible into something more constructive?

I guess i don't understand why it would be necessary to re-interpret the bible in the first place. Would you defend Icarus or Prometheus so eloquently?

It seems that this is a last ditch effort to try to wring some value out of this text when all other interpretations falter.
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Interbane wrote:Do you consider yourself a Christian? You say god doesn't exist, and nothing of the bible should be taken literally; any meaning derived can be derived from other sources. There's nothing left!
Yes I do consider myself a Christian. In discussing the existence of God I compared popular concepts of God – including yours - to shadows on a wall. Shadows are real but are only a distorted image, just as popular concepts are a real distortion. Here I am thinking especially of your dogmatic insistence that unless God is proven to be an entity then any religious talk is meaningless. Truly, you are advancing a facile ‘heads I win tails you lose’ type of argument. God cannot be discovered as an entity in the way you demand, but your logical inference, that therefore God doesn’t exist, breaks down because arguments that apply to entities do not apply to the whole.

It is the popular insistence that existence is only an attribute of entities that is the stumbling block here. Traditional theology defines God as the infinite and eternal totality of everything. This definition works for Einstein’s God as well as for more magical personal conceptions. However, the difference is that Einstein would not consider this definition as referring to an entity, whereas magical theology would see it this way. It is not clear how existence can be predicated of wholistic ideas like being, eternity and infinity.

Martin Heidegger, in his works Being and Time and An Introduction to Metaphysics, is a useful guide on this material. He notes that a categorical distinction must be drawn between being (the underlying totality of existence) and beings (entities), and observes that explaining the nature of entities is not a direct guide to understanding the meaning of being.

Of course nothing in the Bible should be taken literally, if by that you mean as an inerrant authority. There are probably true facts in the Bible, but the distortions in its formation process, relying heavily on the documentation of oral traditions, make it quite unreliable as a historical source.

I never said “any meaning derived can be derived from other sources.” The idea of Christ is a central meaningful idea in the Bible, as I discussed earlier here in conversation with DWill about Christology. The idea of Christ provides a theory regarding the connection between temporal life and eternal truth which most emphatically cannot be derived from other sources, although it may well synthesise themes drawn from other ancient ideas such as Horus and Krishna.
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RT: "Here I am thinking especially of your dogmatic insistence that unless God is proven to be an entity then any religious talk is meaningless."

This highlights two misunderstandings. I'm not insisting that god must be proven to be an entity. I'm looking to understand what you think god is. I said the same thing a few posts back. If you consider him a force, then how does he compare to the other forces? There is nothing nothing nothing to go on here, I'm not understanding what you mean when you say 'god'. If god can only be understood at arms length, as the allegory implies, there must be something that is casting the shadow, otherwise it's nothing but your imagination.

The other part is that there may very well be meaning within religion, but it was placed there by man and can be found elsewhere. You do offer an example that wouldn't be found elsewhere;

RT: "The idea of Christ provides a theory regarding the connection between temporal life and eternal truth which most emphatically cannot be derived from other sources."

Such a theory would be unique to the bible, you're correct. I think this is wishful thinking. First, the idea of Christ(whatever that is) is an idea thought up in the heads of men and written in the bible. If it resembles a theory, it most likely was a theory of ancient theologians. By today's standards, theories are held to much stricter standards. Can you elucidate this theory to show how it can be examined by either empiricism or rationalism? Then you mention a connection between temporal life and eternal truth. What do you mean 'connection'? A metaphysical tether? A causal relationship? A correlation? Finally you mention 'eternal truth', which is an ideal which will likely forever be out of our reach. Any progress toward eternal truth would be found in modern philosophy, not in the christian bible!

The idea is more than a stretch. If you wish we can discontinue this conversation and you can hold onto your beliefs personally, because I think that's your only option.
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DWill wrote:Deconstruction or destruction?
Ironically, Derrida’s term deconstruction is a translation of Heidegger’s Destruktion, referring to analysis of tradition to uncover its hidden meaning. For example Heidegger deconstructs Descartes ‘cogito ergo sum’ through the observation that human life only exists in a world, and the isolated atomism of Cartesian rationalism establishes a worldview which cannot see care as the meaning of being. Yet Heidegger owes much to Descartes so his critique is intended more as a transformation than a rejection.

I am looking at a similar sort of deconstruction of Christianity in order to transform it into something compatible with its intellectual sources. For example the doctrine of the resurrection can be deconstructed by seeing it as a myth that life with integrity will bounce back against the power of evil, a parable with significant meaning regardless of whether Christ existed. The virgin birth is a story more in need of destruction, as serving the agendas of the church to put Jesus and Mary on pedestals as unhuman beings, and to serve a morality which narrowly focuses on sexuality.

Terms such as ‘heaven’, ‘salvation’ and ‘God’ have dominant cultural meanings which are scientifically false. Yet these terms are immensely valuable, and so need to be deconstructed rather than destroyed.
johnson1010 wrote:Seeing your counterpoints clarifies your position to me Robert. Now given that you are not speaking as though any portion of the bible is literally true, but to be understood as metaphorical, why is this particular text of any greater value than the works of thousands of other prescient writers?
Hi again Johnson, thanks for these comments. The Bible is at the centre of world culture. As I noted, it raises deep mythopoetic themes such as the apocalypse which are powerful parables for the actual trends of world politics. By asking who was Jesus Christ really, we actually open core questions about the nature of human identity.
Are you simply making a case that we should not abandon the writings of the bible all together, or that it should still have a place of honor in our culture, summarily trumping other sources?
’Summary trumping’ is precisely the historic problem of proof by authority, the invalid method applied by the church to squash debate and establish monolithic power. There needs to be a liberal and pluralist contest of ideas, which is why God is Not Great is such a superb and important book. The ‘place of honour’ question is separate, because the value I see in the Bible is different from the way it has historically been used, which is to claim redemption for very flawed human institutions. My view is that the gospels provide a sublime critique of the psychological grasping at dominion and control which is at the centre of the fallen nature of humanity. The Bible is only valuable if it is contestable.
it almost seems that you may have formulated an alternative view of morality and then retro-actively imposed it on the barbaric lunacy of the bible. Wouldn't you be doing yourself a favor by abandoning this text and making your own way?
No. As Newton said, it is better to stand on the shoulders of giants, providing an evolutionary form of thought which builds on earlier precedents. As I noted above, the key texts of the Bible are the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer and the Last Judgement. These are entirely the foundation of the morality I am proposing. Yes, it is different from dominant theories, but no, it is not something retro-actively imposed, as it is clearly there at the centre of the bible.
Are you making a case that there should be an effort to turn people's familiarity with the bible into something more constructive?
Very much so. This is an agenda that Jesus predicted when he said the end of the age would come when the gospel had been preached to the whole earth. The Christian Age has been built on flawed premises, especially the false equation between eternal life and afterlife. Eternity is only meaningful if it intrudes into the temporal through a focus on lasting values such as love, truth and justice, shifting the basis of behaviour away from instinct (eg the desire to live forever) on to reason (eg scientific understanding).
I guess i don't understand why it would be necessary to re-interpret the bible in the first place. Would you defend Icarus or Prometheus so eloquently?
Great question. Greek mythology, in my view, has a basic flaw by comparison to Christianity, in its lack of an orientation towards a divine totality. Icarus and Prometheus are archetypes of impiety, the assertion of human hubris against divine power. Of course, this assertion is at the basis of western civilization, but these stories have a powerful lesson in the punishment meted by the Gods. Today, we hubristically pile carbon out of the ground and into the air, and continuing this path will produce a destruction akin to the melting of Icarus’s waxy wings when he flew too close to the sun.

By contrast, the message of Christ is that we should transform our lives to achieve harmony with the divine reality. In terms of contemporary world politics this looks to me to require a transformation of our concepts of security away from the military aggrandisement of the nation-state and towards the security agenda of real problems such as poverty, climate and water.
It seems that this is a last ditch effort to try to wring some value out of this text when all other interpretations falter.
Joseph Campbells myth of the hero emphasises that salvation only arrives when we get to the last ditch. :smile:
Interbane wrote: I'm not insisting that god must be proven to be an entity. I'm looking to understand what you think god is. I said the same thing a few posts back. If you consider him a force, then how does he compare to the other forces? There is nothing nothing nothing to go on here, I'm not understanding what you mean when you say 'god'. If god can only be understood at arms-length, as the allegory implies, there must be something that is casting the shadow, otherwise it's nothing but your imagination.
Hi Interbane, sorry about calling you dogmatic, I misread your earlier comment. The shadow is cast by the cyclic structures of the cosmos. In our debate in the Milton thread I explained my views on this at some length, focussing on how the physical scientific structure of the precession of the equinox sits at the empirical basis of the Christian theory of time. On this view, God is the determinant regular structure of the cosmos for the temporal patterns of the earth. I explain how I draw this novel claim from the Bible at my essay on the biblical metaphor of the twelve jewels.
the idea of Christ(whatever that is) is an idea thought up in the heads of men and written in the bible. If it resembles a theory, it most likely was a theory of ancient theologians. By today's standards, theories are held to much stricter standards. Can you elucidate this theory to show how it can be examined by either empiricism or rationalism? Then you mention a connection between temporal life and eternal truth. What do you mean 'connection'? A metaphysical tether? A causal relationship? A correlation? Finally you mention 'eternal truth', which is an ideal which will likely forever be out of our reach. Any progress toward eternal truth would be found in modern philosophy, not in the christian bible!
The ‘idea of Christ’ is summarised in the prologue of the Gospel of John, where Christ is identified with eternal rationality, through the concept of logos – word or reason. The question of connection is whether eternal rationality can be manifest in human life. You are right that this is a central problem for modern philosophy, but it seems a hasty move to assert that biblical theology has nothing to teach about it. The point of the Bible is that if we all lived according to eternal rationality then the world would be perfect, but our planet is so far fallen away from our original identity that we need a representative of eternal reason, ie Christ, to tell us how to restore our natural harmony with God.

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RT: "...the physical scientific structure of the precession of the equinox sits at the empirical basis of the Christian theory of time."

You have that backwards. The men who wrote the bible included some cosmology, nothing more. They theorized over whatever patterns they saw in the sky. I don't remember what happened with the thread where we were discussing this, but during that time, your arguments convinced me that there is no special connection between the bible and cosmology.

RT: "The ‘idea of Christ’ is summarised in the prologue of the Gospel of John, where Christ is identified with eternal rationality, through the concept of logos – word or reason."

So, we can do away with Christ and the rest of the bible and focus on eternal rationality, and the problems that it poses. Correlating the two is either wishful thinking or taking the bible for divine truth.

RT: "The point of the Bible is that if we all lived according to eternal rationality then the world would be perfect."

No, that is one interpretation amongst millions. That it is pragmatic and morally correct is nothing more than the process of natural selection of the interpretation. I doubt we'd be discussing the evils of the bible as the same divinely inspired writing you claim to see.

RT: "The shadow is cast by the cyclic structures of the cosmos."

The only reality the 'shadow' portrays is the mechanical workings of celestial bodies according to natural laws and forces. It can all be explained mechanically, without exception. Why disillusion yourself by claiming to see god in there somewhere?
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RT: "The point of the Bible is that if we all lived according to eternal rationality then the world would be perfect."

Isn't the bible really saying that this life is just a stage for the trial of an afterlife? Whose perfect? Are you? A major component of the bible deals with the unavoidable sins inherent in man and a persons struggle against this degrading influence, I don't think it even really implies any realistic scenario where man is born any other way. You could point to the book of Genesis I suppose but that is really more of an allegory than a reflection of reality. Perhaps the flooded world would satisfy your notions of gods perfect order? If no humans are being born at a particular time then no sin is entering and those present have been approved to live by god. It's perfect. I'll bet 9 out of 10 theologians agree that even Job was born with sin.

The notion of an eternal rationality is so loosely used here that I doubt it could possibly be described to a necessary degree of refinement as to have even the slightest critical merits.

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