lady of shallot wrote: I fail to understand why we should construct a God to be understood as a "natural purpose" matching the ideal purpose of human life. This sounds mightily like a Biblical God except now we are defining God as matching us.
The underlying question here is whether language about God can be meaningful. Science indicates, rightly in my view, that all supernatural claims are meaningless. The scientific critique of religious speculation implies that any genuine meaning in religious language has to refer to something natural, and that unnatural statements (eg miracles) must be allegory for something natural if they are to have any meaning.
Many atheists believe that all religious language is inherently meaningless. Against this atheist attitude, it can be argued that a sense of human spirituality is meaningful when it articulates ethics that point to a universal truth about human potential. This is what I meant by talking of God as a natural purpose, as the set of ideas that sustain human flourishing. If the God described by such a method indicates a path of global evolutionary success for humanity, it can be argued that such a natural purpose is as much a discovery as a construction. This idea provides a natural basis to understand the old myth of humanity as made in the image of God.
As an example of how to interpret the Bible in natural terms, we can read the Sermon on the Mount at Matthew 5 as saying that life in the Roman Empire was seriously alienated from values that are essential to human flourishing. The imperial ethics of conquest and control applied a monolithic doctrine with the basic agenda of justifying Roman rule, regardless of the consequences. Against this worldly ethic, Jesus presented a theory of blessedness, the idea that people who behave in defined ways are in tune with universal values. Jesus counts among the blessed the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the meek, those who mourn, those who seek the good, those who are persecuted for doing good, the poor in spirit and the merciful. Just considering these values on their own terms, we can see that they run counter to basic human instincts such as revenge, hatred and greed, and present a higher and more rational path. A world in which these values were made central would be far better than our current situation. The Sermon on the Mount can be read as an evolutionary ethic, a vision of benign cultural mutation towards human ability to live on the basis of reason rather than instinct, a program for transformation to adapt to our real planetary environment.
Jesus goes on in the Sermon on the Mount to deliver a series of pointed concealed barbs against Rome. ‘Give your cloak as well as your coat’ is actually a teaching to shame those who put people into destitution by harsh enforcement of debt. ‘Turn the other cheek’ is a call to nonviolent integrity in defiance against those who enforce unjust hierarchies and regard others as beneath contempt. ‘Go the extra mile’ is a call to shame the Roman legions who were permitted to force locals to carry a soldier’s pack one mile but not two. The essential message is that our world enforces unjust inequality, but the path of God seeks to transform the world in line with universal values, in order that ‘thy will be done on earth as in heaven’. By this vision, heaven is not a location for an afterlife, but a vision of a transformed earth.
What is the ideal purpose of human life? For most of us the purpose of our lives is very simple. We did not call our selves into being, so why should we (that is the bulk of us) be concerned with an "ideal purpose" to our lives?
Simplicity conceals great complexity. You may be right that not everyone should worry about an ideal purpose, but I would be worried if no one at all worried about such complex questions. The rarity of such enquiry does not invalidate it. The basic question of ideal purpose is how philosophy can articulate a coherent and consistent universal ethic to enable humanity to prosper in peace and freedom.
My view is that the Christian doctrine of fall and redemption helps us to formulate a universal ethical cosmology. The Christian theory of redemption can be read as holding that people should live in accord with an ideal purpose, whereby everything would steadily improve towards peace, love and freedom, but that our world is now very far from such an ideal, and in fact is getting steadily worse.
Redemption can be interpreted in purely evolutionary terms, as the set of behaviors that will sustain a steady increase in universal wellbeing. Jesus explains his vision of such an ideal purpose in Matthew 25, where he argues for a combination of entrepreneurial investment and works of mercy.
Texts that suggest a supernatural theory of redemption are irrelevant to this underlying universal purpose, because the supernatural symbols such as the last trumpet and the four horsemen are just blinds that conceal a hidden real message.
Basically we want to be loved, safe, sheltered, educated, employed, productive members of our societies who hopefully raise any offspring to be the same, thus making our contributions to the continuum of human life for as long as natural conditions make our species as we exist now necessary and viable.
The Bible endorses these values, but it also contains an apocalyptic claim that our world is actually trending in the reverse direction, and that efforts to alert people to this problem are systematically ignored. We certainly see this refusal to see the big picture at the moment with climate change, where the general desire for simple pleasures is risking the end of life on our planet.
Christ, understood as the archetype of the perfect man, suggests that recognition of the depth of evil in the world is unwelcome because the ruling powers and systems are themselves evil. What this means, again in evolutionary terms, is that our world is trending towards human extinction, and a comprehensive shift of mindset is necessary to reverse this dangerous trend. The story of Easter is that telling people about the problem led the messenger to be crucified, but that the truth of the message led to resurrection and vindication.
I can understand that such questions and quests and definitions are important to you Robert. I don't understand why but that doesn't mean I don't recognize that there is a why. I also realize that you are mentally superior to me but I think there also are not too many people that will be willing to join you in your understanding of a God inherent in nature. Even if you wish to see such a God personally, why does it need any further discussion?
These questions are important to me because I care about the future of our planet, and because I believe that this same natural vision of God was at the heart of authentic ancient religion and should be restored today. My view is that the understanding of God as inherent in nature was at the source of the original message of Christ, but this message was systematically denied and concealed because the dominant powers of the world found it to be against their temporal interests.
The original message was steadily diluted to make it palatable to a mass audience, but it remains at the core of the Bible as a natural message of salvation. The true kernel is surrounded by weeds that will eventually be burnt away as truth comes increasingly to be defined in terms of evidence rather than authority.
The church presented the message of Christ as a supernatural miraculous fable, close enough to the original natural truth to resonate intuitively with a mass audience as a source of salvation, but far enough from it to be neutered as a message of real change. The lies at the foundation of Christianity are so great that they are the origin of what Hitler called the big lie, a deception on so grand a scale that people simply cannot imagine anyone having the effrontery to tell such whoppers. The biggest lie of all is the claim that the Gospel account of Jesus Christ is historically literal, when in fact it is allegory for an eternal cosmic vision.
Why could we not say the same thing about the sun and consider the sun in all the ways you speak of God inherent in nature.
We can in fact consider the sun as an analogy for God, as the source of light and life, and this has been a very widespread religious idea. In Christianity, the rising of the sun is a metaphor for the rising of Christ. Veneration for the sun has some merit, considering that it holds 99.8% of the mass of our solar system, and so puts the scale of our earth into some natural perspective. The sun is at the center of the long term natural cycles of the solar system, causing deep evolutionary patterns on earth, such as cycles of glaciation. Putting mythology into this long temporal frame of natural reference can help us to understand myth as containing a real evolutionary message.
