Robert Tulip wrote:The accidental chaos of life is a primary factor in what we could call the Job syndrome, that unexpected dangers can disrupt our placidity. But we all know that unlikely and unmerited risks do occur. Linking to the moral hazard issue we discussed above, this problem of unexplained suffering shows that even those who deserve happiness should be cautious and humble, since if we are certain nothing can possibly go wrong our attitudes are contaminated by arrogance, ignoring unforeseen hazards.
Well, it's all very well to take a pragmatic attitude, and that's certainly my stance. But I am after a sorting out of philosophical problems, as well. The question is how our beliefs about risk, danger, unpredictability mesh with our stories to make sense of life.
Robert Tulip wrote:I know people who are like Job’s wife, whose faith has been shattered by unmerited suffering, people who see theodicy as clear simple logical evidence that God does not exist. It takes a sort of philosophical detachment, the legendary patience of Job, to rise above such attitudes.
I think our ability to take on some philosophical detachment depends heavily on how it all has been explained to us in the past. "Evidence that God does not exist" needs to be unpacked: if we have been told that God is a great big helper who takes an interest in seeing that we go down the road of prosperity rather than the road of ruin, nudging us with little rewards for faithfulness and little slaps for prodigality, then it is easy for that picture to fall apart with serious unmerited suffering.
Likewise if we have been told that God is a cosmic judge who will roast the bad guys when they die, it is easy for us to either scoff or interpret it as opiate put forward by the bad guys who were made king. Which, of course, it is to some extent.
When I conceptualize God as spirit of caring, what I get is that the dangers which we should not get complacent about are just random shocks and God is interested in helping us maintain a sense of meaning despite them. Rather than thinking of how an omnipotent God might have saved me this pain, I see that God wants to be with me and by my side, and being empathetic, feels my pain.
And of course, the experience of comfort of other people is more important even than the meaning structures we have been told about. A God of caring helps to animate a people of caring, which in turn makes caring both more rational and more likely to feel right.
Oh, but doesn't that mean that God will not stop an earthquake from killing 50,000 people? And that God will not stop a madman from leading an execution of 12 million people? The spirit of caring is not about omnipotence. It is about helping people stay out of those fits of madness and keep from brutal treatment of others. We don't start with the notion that God is a secret power who "could have" stopped these things. We focus on the catastrophe that happens when people endorse brutality and plunge into it. A catastrophe for themselves and the people around them, not just for the victims.
There is a marvelous essay in today's New York Times, apparently too new to have a link on Google.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/03/opin ... type=Blogs
Stephen Asma looks at religion, as I have been, through the lens of neuropsychology. He sees atheism as a creature of the (relatively recent, in evolutionary terms) neocortex, while religion and its emotional bonding are creatures of the limbic system (older, more fundamental, more proven). He makes a strong case that it is foolish to throw away the emotional support of other people for the sake of our skeptical impulses.
But of course that doesn't mean we have to buy into the dichotomy. We can conceptualize the matters at issue in a way that doesn't cause our skeptical neocortex to revolt, without letting go of the emotional bonding and support that comes from good practices and incarnational aspirations.
And I take it further than Asma in another way. Religion is not just a system of practices to help each other, even if it is that most fundamentally. It is also a philosophy to make the connections that animate meaning. Why does it make sense to adopt a child? Why is it a meaningful act to shed some money for a cause, even if you cannot be sure the money will be well spent? Why do we vote for justice for other people even though they might not do the same if they were in power?
We create a series of answers to such questions, and a good conceptual framework is one in which the answers are internally consistent with one another. First it has to uphold the practices of aspiration and mutual support, but ultimately it also has to make sense of life even when the chaos threatens to shatter our sense that our caring matters. Crucially, we have to give up on absoluteness of support for caring, because that is how relationship works. We do not automatically insist on any idea or principle that better supports caring, as William Jennings Bryan insisted on creationism out of disgust with the social lessons being drawn by Clarence Darrow and other Social Darwinists. Rather we try to perceive the weave, by which the emotions and the interpretations create strength of purpose.
Robert Tulip wrote:Harry Marks wrote: Once you get past theology in Platonic "omni-s", based on the notion that whatever is superlative must be God's nature, theodicy loses its interest.
The trouble though, Harry, is that these three stooges, omnipresence, omnipotence and omnibenevolence, (not to forget omniscience in the way Jung accuses God of doing) are major stumbling blocks for theology.
Well, we know what to do with stumbling blocks: life our feet up and step over them.
Robert Tulip wrote:I don’t agree that these universal attributes are based just on Anselm’s ontological proof with its focus on God’s perfection.
No, of course not. Jung has the right idea: they are based on projections of power and longing for justice. As a result the relation to such a God is self-blinding, as the power claimants refuse to look at their own less-than-just choices and God's vicar burns other people at the stake. Because second-guessing one's commitment to justice is not "how power behaves." It would undermine its own methodology and sense of identity.
Robert Tulip wrote: If instead we look at theology from an axiomatic natural perspective, as I presented earlier in this thread, defining God in ways such as the real hidden anthropic order of the cosmos, and the set of enabling conditions for human flourishing, it is fairly easy to move logically from these axiomatic premises to the inference that God is a universal reality, present everywhere and effective through the natural laws of physics.
But Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids, as Sir Elton pointed out in Rocket Man. In fact it's cold as Hell. Either the Mars of warfare, grasping the reins of power because this life is all we have, or the Mars of Science, exploring Truth with a capital T and going wherever our questions seem to lead us (or the Mars of Rocket Man, who doesn't understand the science and responds to complicated life by getting high).
Either the hidden anthropic order of Things or the enabling conditions for human flourishing are noble symbols of a distant providence which takes some casual interest in us and has our best interests somewhere in its cold, cold heart. Until we dare to discern them actually come to life in human choices, Acts of the Body of Christ, if you like, they provide only a tepid source of bonding.
Robert Tulip wrote: Now it is again fairly easy to accept that Reality is omnipresent. Omnipotent is a bit harder, but if we define the laws of physics as the mechanism of omnipotence of Reality that hurdle can be jumped. The next two, omnibenevolence and omniscience, are far tougher. The story of Job indicates that God is not omnibenevolent, since Job suffers undeserved evil. That is why Jung rejects that attribute, saying that the assumption that God is good creates a psychological distortion in the nature of faith. If God is Reality, then God is present in evil as much as in good, in dark as much as in light. But we have to focus on the good in order to cultivate the aspects of God that benefit us in the long term.
I haven't gotten far enough in my reading to catch Jung in the act of rejecting God's goodness. But Job, in insisting that there is justice in the universe and meaning despite the cruelties, has "co-created" a sense of how meaning works that does not locate it in the Creator of such a potentially monstrous Reality.
Jung wants us to look at life whole, to see both the good and the bad, and that is Job's first reaction as well. But to then take a next step and assert that therefore we "must have" done something bad if bad things happen to us, in order for justice to have meaning, is to fake meaning. We have to locate it where it is, in Job's faithfulness to meaning and Job's willingness to accept suffering and maintain his commitment.
I think the truth is that Jung was much more interested in God as a description and a theory than in God as a real, living presence in people's lives. I will refrain from commenting on the nature of Swiss culture, which I am surrounded by.
Robert Tulip wrote:Jung arguably makes a similar argument, saying that “God is Reality itself and therefore — last but not least— man. This realization is a millennial process.”
I fear I consider this to be a mistaken set of connections. Yes, man is potentially cruel like Reality, but our ultimate concern impels us to live above that potential, and reach toward the light. Survival for its own sake is a nihilistic choice in denial of meaning. Life has purpose, because we choose to live it that way.
And so we do not discern man incarnating God at Auschwitz or Nineveh. That is incarnating a bestial projection of power. Better to back off from the power claims and refrain from anthropomorphising reality.
Robert Tulip wrote:Omnibenevolence presents the core paradox of theodicy, that a good powerful God would not allow innocent suffering, so God must not be all good. Continuing Jung’s theme of God as Reality, it is obvious that reality has many bad features, from the human point of view. But perhaps if we stand back, as Job invites us with his visions of the heavens, we can imagine that the negative cycles that we deplore are part of an upward spiral toward what Dante called the love that rules the stars.
Or we could relax the omnipotence constraint. The God who is a living presence in our life did not make a painless or essentially just universe because that was not within God's powers. Reality is what it is. We may affirm visions of order and reliability within nature, but those will always include spasms of indifferent ferocity. Why ask this "God" character to pretend to omnipotence?
Robert Tulip wrote:It seems cruel to consider the current suffering of the world, with Paul, against a big picture of building endurance, character and hope.
Once you see the cruelty of nature in its indifference, you cannot escape the conclusion that life's trials build character. The mistake is to conclude that they are deliberately sent to us for that purpose.
Robert Tulip wrote:Finally, on omniscience, with its paradox of foreknowledge and freedom,
It is absurd for an all-knowing deity to be surprised by events that turn out differently from expected. The uncertainty principle in quantum theory suggests that divine omniscience, accepting for a moment that reality is personal and alive, can only be about the past and present, not the future, which has an unavoidable character of free randomness at the micro level, even while major trends are deterministic.
Out in space again. The incarnated Spirit of Caring also does not know the future, though it may have intuitions about it. This omniscient character was a Boojum.
Fr. Richard Rohr says, in today's meditation,
Richard Rohr wrote:The contemplative stance is the Third Way. We stand in the middle, neither taking the world on from another power position nor denying it for fear of the pain it will bring. We hold the hardness of reality and the suffering of the world until it transforms us, knowing that we are both complicit in evil and can participate in wholeness and holiness. Once we can stand in that third spacious way, neither directly fighting or fleeing, we are in the place of grace out of which genuine newness can come. This is where creativity and new forms of life and healing emerge.
Robert Tulip wrote: Carl Jung wrote:
Why, then, is the experiment made at all, and a bet with the unscrupulous slanderer settled, without a stake, on the back of a powerless creature?
I prefer to say the test of Job is a mythological illustration of the arbitrary chaos of the fall from grace, and that is its purpose. The collapse into pitiless cruelty is a way of saying God has retreated from the world, giving secular power to Satan. Jung’s line about God taking counsel with his own omniscience is a memorable irony, since God obviously knew about Job’s moral character.
And why should we seek to be like that God?
The just king, who is the archetype that the Medieval God of Providence and Judgement was meant to represent to us, would certainly not try to fix every spat between neighbors. But neither would he turn his territory over to the brigands, to contemplate the beauty of goodness up in his tower of ivory.
I think the story of the Fall is a kind of progress, because in it the Gods are not just absentee makers of nature cataclysms who try to make sure people don't get too uppity. God cares about something in human life, obedience, which can be connected to the covenant relation of the Hebrew religion. But as a story of why life is full of suffering and trouble it is as clumsy as Pandora with her box, and it works much better as a story of lost innocence when children attain sexuality and have to start being responsible. We all know what a headache that is.
Robert Tulip wrote:Carl Jung wrote: It is indeed no edifying spectacle to see how quickly Yahweh abandons his faithful servant to the evil spirit and lets him fall without compunction or pity into the abyss of physical and moral suffering.
This pitiless abyss is a perfect description of the fall. The suffering of the faithful innocent is inflicted by the God of Reality, whom Jung suggests deserves our adoration, whereas Christianity has largely shifted its faith to the God of Imagination, trusting in blind comfort rather than logic and evidence.
But when it works right, which is actually a lot of the time, the comfort isn't blind and has arms and tears to respond when the suffering is seen. It is tents and rations from the Red Cross, and a lifeline of hope to human rights advocates. It is a casserole carried to the door of the sick.
Jung is at pains to have us see our shadow side, and not engage in denial. It says something important about our whole civilization that the cataclysms of the 20th century arose out of denial and projection of negativity, anger, fear and aggression. But the denial process was precisely not one of thinking suffering was deserved or reality is just. It was instead the one of pretended omnipotence refusing to be held accountable for just behavior.
The God of imagination, who loves us unconditionally, is a conceptualization of something quite real, who satisfies every test logic and evidence throws at it.
Robert Tulip wrote: Carl Jung wrote:From the human point of view Yahweh's behaviour is so revolting that one has to ask oneself whether there is not a deeper motive hidden behind it. Has Yahweh some secret resistance against Job? That would explain his yielding to Satan.
Attributing motives to God is an exercise in anthropomorphisation, contrary to the unconscious power of fate that Jung suggests characterises the divine unleashing of the attack on Job. But as long as we remember this personification is an exercise in archetypal myth, the question Jung asks retains its power.
It is power of a type that would not be allowed to speak aloud until the last century, unless you count heavily abstracted symbolism like Voltaire's
Candide. Does power resent accountability? Does white privilege resent political correctness? Is there really any question to be answered, except how to make a world in which such questions are safe to ask?
Robert Tulip wrote: As I explained in detail in my recent essay on
The Precessional Structure of Time, the earth has slow cycles of light and dark, and the last ten thousand years have been a period of increasing darkness in cultural terms, matching directly to this myth that Jung discusses of God yielding to Satan.
I think this slow cycle analysis is too slow to be of any use as mythology. Offer it to the pre-millenialists. They seem to be fascinated by this sort of thing.
Robert Tulip wrote:Carl Jung wrote: But what does man possess that God does not have? Because of his littleness, puniness, and defencelessness against the Almighty, he possesses, as we have already suggested, a somewhat keener consciousness based on self-reflection: he must, in order to survive, always be mindful of his impotence.
This is a remarkable piece of speculation on Jung’s part, that human self-reflection brings consciousness into the world for the first time, and that God actually learns from Job the meaning of presence in a fallen world, later incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ, reflecting the mind of God in nature. That mythological structure applies just as well to a real as to a mythical Jesus.
Humanity must be mindful of our vulnerability, yes. Jesus saw that God is vulnerable, too. To care about another is to be vulnerable. In the market, others are just ways to get one's own satisfaction. We are now in a situation in which we need to learn how to add the salt and leaven of caring, even about people not of our tribe, into the meal of self-interest.
Did God learn faithfulness (or presence, as you put it) from Job? Perhaps. At least the people writing about God did, which may be all we can really assess. I agree with you that either a real Jesus or a story-Jesus who acts like the Jesus in those stories can, with approximately equal effectiveness, convey the possibility of meaning in the face of cataclysm, (or, if you like, in the face of loss and vulnerability).