Information
and Theology
Implications for computer applications,
HCI and AI
by Kristo
Ivanov, prof.em., Umeå University
June 2018 (rev. 231116-1620)
<http://www8.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/Theo.html>
<https://archive.org/details/kivanov_informatik_Theo>
CONTENTS
Link
to a General Disclaimer
Introduction: Why?
Personal reflections
Range of Meaning, and the Brain
Theology as the Queen of the Sciences
Censorship of Talk about Religion
Reduction of Religion to Science
A case for study of Psychology of
Religion
Reduction of Religion to Politics
Case study: politics is easier than religion
Case study: the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Explaining Away Traditions and Religion
Theology without God: Heidegger.
Autopoiesis, Evolution
Theology without God: Feministic Sweden
Ego Inflation
Religion or Art as Opium for the People
"Myths" of Artificial
Intelligence
To Believe and to Know
Religion and Virtual Reality - VR
Information on: Christianism or
Atheism
Miracles, Myth, Reality, and Truth
Requests for Proof as Requests for
Power
From Science to Philosophy, to Religion
The case of Quantum Physics
Dealing Modestly with the Unknown -
Deflated Ego
Behaving Humans Beings - Simple as Ants
Anthropomorphism
Love and Evolutionary Self-Preservation
The Galileo Affair
Adaptation to an Evolutionary Changing
World
Speculation and Introspection
Intuitions in Music
Explanations of Evil: Theodicy
Paganism, atheism and the future of our youth
Concluding reflections on the reflections
-----
With increasing frequency I have been concluding my writings with
references to religious aspects of the questions that in an academic context
become rather theological questions of different degrees of sophistication.
Most of the time after my retirement as emeritus has been dedicated to
discovering and show how many problems I dealt with in information science and
practice eventually have to be boiled down terminating in theological
questions. They appear most clearly in discussions of teleological matters such
as the meaning of efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity represented
lately by hopes in "artificial intelligence - AI. Even reactions to the
decline of the idea of university in the context of increasing
economic-political control by means of New
Public Management (that is old Programme Budgeting already condemned in the "old" book Systems Analysis in Public Policy)
1972, 2018) hope for a return to an ideal "management by trust",
which presupposes an "old" religious work ethic in Max Weber's spirit.
These matters usually end in the best case in obscure economics and politics
when they do not remain on the technical level - as in the case of discussions
of climate change or misuses of Facebook. All the rest is banished to
inconsequential "philosophy", without reference to ethics and still
less to any of the Ten
Commandments that stand at the base of resistance
to human greed, capital
vices and all problems, misuses and evil
which follows from them. This to the point that it has been noted that if all
people followed at least 4 or 5 of the commandments the world would begin to
look as a terrestrial paradise.
In writing this I have felt uncomfortable since I am painfully aware of living
in an outspokenly secular country and in a societal and academic context where
there is a generally sharp distinction and separation between
science and religion. The secular division between science and religion
can be summarized in the concepts of scientism , physicalism, biologism (biological determinism), and related materialism. They were quite early opposed by the Church in, for instance,
encyclicals such as Aeterni Patris, followed by discourses on the relationship between the natural sciences and
religious belief. Today the issue is occasionally debated
in certain fora such as, for instance, in the C.S.
Lewis Society of California. I sense, however, that
in a extremely secular country the sheer word God and religion is
often barred from appearing, or is even ridicularized in mass media
and in academic, discourse.
Being well aware of the historical complexity of the problem I will not enter
into an obviously preposterous general discussion of theology such as those by
Christian apologists like Thomas
Aquinas or, more popularly, C.S.
Lewis. A really advanced theology of
information would probably have to be a discussion of, say, Plato's work that
can be related to that question, as I tried to do in Platonic
Information Technology (integral pre-publication text in
pdf-format here). Or it would consider Logos or a comment of Aquinas'
first lectures commenting the first
chapters of the Gospel of St. John, as
"In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God; and the Word
was God". Such debate would also contradict my
earlier conclusions about the
impossibility of (interminable) debate on these matters. This is also the reason
why I do not undertake a complex polemic review of an atheistic book such
as The God Delusion (see more below) or even more recent
apologetic attempts such as Seven Types of Atheism
. In
regard to my readers I will only account for some of my personal thoughts that
have arised and sustained me in my work, based as they are upon my
lifelong experiences and readings, touching ultimately the question of
scientism in its various interpretations and connections with, e.g.
materialism.
Let me begin by acknowledging that despite of have been baptized in early
childhood as Bulgarian Orthodox I was raised in a religiously
lukewarm family and in a Catholic Italian school until the age of
12. Following the emigration of the family and my arrival to Brazil my
germinal childlike faith was, however, shaken after some unfortunate delusory
contacts with a rebuffing Catholic priest. It was followed by a period in which
I considered myself as atheist among atheists until about the age of 40, long
after my graduation and work as electronic and electrical engineer. This means
that I know a good deal about thoughts and feelings of some if not a majority
of atheists, not the least among engineers and computer or information
researchers.
I must also acknowledge that I would probably not have changed my (ir)religious
mind if my doctoral advisor prof. West
Churchman (1913-2004) in his later books had not indicated a
necessary and legitimate bridge between science and theology, which led me
further to the study of the works of Carl
Jung, followed by a consequential cascade of
other readings on the practice and philosophy of science as well as on
religions and theology. In doing so I parted company with another most serious
Swiss student of Churchman, Werner Ulrich, who opted for a return to the - in
my view - dangerously seducing philosophy of Immanuel Kant (and his
follower Jürgen Habermas), without taking visible notice of all historic
criticism of his philosophy (a sort of pedagogical summary here). The result of what I consider to be a
hopeless search for a misunderstood "communicative rationality" can
be induced from a late "confession" by Ulrich in his homepage
for March-May 2018 Toward a "Knowledge Democracy": the promise of completing a series of essays dedicated to the role of
general ideas in Western and Eastern thought, titled "The Rational,
the Moral, and the General". My conviction is that what one needs to
obtain from Eastern thought is an understanding of the "rationality"
of analytical psychology, and that "the moral and general" is to be
found in theology.
I use to think that one either absorbs faith and interest for religion, so to
say, with the mother's milk and mother tongue or, then, intellectually and
experientially with God's grace. The latter is one among Blaise Pascal's
conclusions in his Pensées where he also writes
"La foi est différente de
la preuve: l'une est humaine, l'autre est un don
de Dieu." (1949/1955, p. 161, §248 - "Faith is
different from the proof: one is human, the other is a gift of God"). A
noted and discussed motif in Western philosophy has been that grace requires a
sort of searching but receptive, passive, and humble mode in rather conflicting
or alternate terms as suggested by the mathematician Jan Brouwer (more on him
below), and represented by the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer vs.
Gottfried Leibniz (Émilienne Naert in Leibniz
et la Querelle du PurAmour, p.
237.) Related conceptions of the nature of grace were advanced in the theology of Franz von Baader,
but perhaps most forcefully in the particular conception by Max Scheler of (a
nowadays otherwise often misunderstood and misused) phenomenology that in the
context of "love and the phenomenological attitude" is described as
Thus, the particular attitude (Geisteshaltung, lit. "disposition of
the spirit" or "spiritual posture") of the philosopher is
crucial for the disclosure, or seeing, of phenomenological facts. This attitude
is fundamentally a moral one, where the strength of philosophical inquiry rests
upon the basis of love. Scheler describes the essence of philosophical thinking as "a
love-determined movement of the inmost personal self of a finite being toward
participation in the essential reality of all possibles."
This could be thought as analog to what is modernly accepted and attributed to
hereditary undefined "chance" in order to explain gifted proficiency
in music, dance, mathematics, languages, visual arts, or sports. The best sign
of humility I did experience in this context is an agnostic philosopher I met
who declared himself as regrettably "tone deaf" for religion. Because
of some reasons surveyed in my paper on Computers as embodied mathematics and logic, arrogant scientism has given priority to a
misunderstood and misused mathematics, downplaying the need
of humilitiy vis-à-vis other people's gifts as expressed in cardinal
Merry del Val's famous prayer-litany.
Christianity prefers to refer specifically to manual-material vs. intellectual
gift (see reference to Sirach, below) and to "Spiritual gift", developed from the Bible's Isaiah 11:2-3, as in the Romans 12:6-8, 1 Corinthians 12:8-10 (most known), 1
Corinthians 12:28, Ephesians
4:11, and 1 Peter 4:11, which includes reference to "service"
work. If one reflects upon the definition of chance, an event for which we do
not know of any correlation with a "known" natural process, then it
becomes obvious that chance is also a measure of human ignorance that
psychologically and paradoxically justifies, for instance, addiction to
gambling behavior. It is a cost of misunderstood ignorance.
Alternatively, if faith is not taken as a gift of God
obtained unconsciously and directly with mother's milk then one, as I myself,
may have to experience the necessity of hard struggle for an indirect
intellectual conquest. Even Pascal's conception of grace mentioned above allows
for that different types of giftedness can enable different types of faith with
different types and degrees of knowledge. An example is the problematic
"mathematical knowledge" of the "physical reality" of
quantum physics, which professional physicists sometimes confess that they
cannot really "understand". For this one must learn a language. A
necessarily ultimately defective but useful analogy is that you must have or
build a radio receiver in order to capture the volatile reality of
electromagnetic waves, which else do not "exist", and you hear
nothing. Or, as Jung expresses it (Psychology and Religion, CW 11,
p.110, §170.)
Faith
is a charisma not granted to all; instead, man has the gift of thought, which
can strive for the highest things. [...] People who merely believe and don't
think always forget that they continually expose themselves to their worst
enemy: doubt. Wherever belief reigns, doubt lurks in the background. But
thinking people welcome doubt: it serves them as a valuable stepping-stone to
better knowledge. People who can believe should be a little more tolerant with
those of their fellows who are only capable of thinking. Belief has already
conquered the summit which thinking tries to win by toilsome climbing. The
believer ought not to project his habitual enemy, doubt, upon the thinker,
thereby suspecting him of destructive designs. It the ancients had not done a
bit of thinking we would not possess any dogma about the Trinity at all. The fact that a dogma is on the one hand
believed and on the other hand is an object of thought is proof of its vitality. Therefore let
the believer rejoice that others, too, seek to climb the mountain on whose peak
he sits.
A full understanding of the above, in view of scientists' skepticism, e.g. skepticism about global
warming or about "climate change
denial" that I discuss elsewhere, requires an understanding that they, and particularly the general lay
public, mostly believe in the power of what they consider to
be science and scientific thought. There is no understanding that the famous
and controversial "sacrifice of the intellect" associated with
the Christian devotional tradition, suggested by Brouwer as shown in my essay on computers and mathematics. It
may also be seen as a sacrifice of the Ego according to analytic psychology. I
was attracted to this psychology upon my expectation of understanding the
"religious" fascination by computers and their opposition of logic
and feelings (at the time, especially with logic
programming). The attraction was reinforced by my
noticing that Jung summarized the intellectual psychological meaning of
religion and, consequently of thousands of years of thoughts and feelings held
by billions of people who even testified to have found in it consolation
and encouragement in affliction. Most of these billions were and are not
distinguished scientists or theologians. They are rather people who have
reflections, and I begin accounting for mine in a simple way, as a cumulative
list of apparently disparate thoughts as I believe that most ordinary engineers
or scientists like me usually formulate during their lives. I do not try to
create of "system" of arguments because I would then absurdly try to
do a sort of updating or executive summary of Aquina's Summa
Theologica. Alternatively
I would risk to fall into what I think is a trap of hopeless
debates by trying to create a new synthesis
or an apparently consistent logical network of arguments about science
and religion as it appears to have been done by Denis O. Lamoureux, or a less logical but more verbose one such as my Robert Spaemann in his Rationality and Faith in God. Not to
mention the logical acrobacies in blending religion and (meta)ethics
as by Michael
Smith. A more readable, elegant and apparently
less polemical alternative would be Peter Kreeft's criticism of the intellectual pillars of unbelief such as Kant, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and Sartre. In contrast, my own reflections are linked by the conception that each
one of them, including my
own account of contacts with atheist friends,
builds a cumulative "unsystematic-popular" argument for my feeling
and my taking seriously, in scientific work, the issue of religion in general
and Christianity in particular.
I must emphasize, however, that such reflections are not the cause but rather
the result of my "conversion", which probably would not have taken
place without events in life that prompted my study of Carl Jung's collected
works with their psychological relation to religion, and their scientific
legitimation by West Churchman's introduction to the essence of rationality in
science, especially natural science. This was completed by the influence
of Tage Lindbom's philosophical and Christian arguments in what concerns political
science, which I elaborated in an early paper on Belief and Reason. In particular, it is
possible that my early contact with Catholicism furnished me with what
Churchman exposes as a "Kantian" form of representation -
or what can be seen as an (always ultimately defective) analogy to the above
mentioned "radio receiver" built out of knowledge about generally
available human material. It allowed me to receive or "perceive"
later, in adult life, the contents of this form, the analog of electromagnetic
waves, i.e. "intelligible inputs to my inquiring system", validating
the axioms of my a priori knowledge. (The Design of Inquiring Systems, p. 129ff.)
I apologize in advance for my consciously adopted "heavy" style of
writing, especially the profusion of links to references that are intended only
for those who feel need for them in order to foster their possible future
related work, being able to resist the temptation to interrupt their first
reading by clicking the links just for curiosity. For the rest I refer to
the disclaimer, my position statement, and letter of
intent, found in my list of subjects of research and
of blog entries.
Range of Meaning, and
the Brain
The first reflection is that in physical science the most valuable theory is
the one which succeeds in "explaining" most phenomena, leaving aside
for the moment definitions and the philosophical question of explanation vs.
understanding, or mechanism vs. teleology vs. probability. Since computer
applications are not restricted to the physical realm we can also search for an
approach to science in general that also explains or gives meaning to most
human phenomena or problems as they are spread out globally in time and space,
and are sensed by billions of people. I cannot expect that a man in his
lifetime of, say 80 years, will be able to review and repeat what billions of
people, or thousands of those who have been considered as brilliant minds, have
thought and experienced in the times span of, say, 5000 years we have records
of.
For atheists and those who believe in materialism for explanation or
understanding it must be fundamental to consider the brain. Sheer (maximum)
1500 cubic centimeters of human brain substance that is said to have evolved
during millions of years in the very particular planetary milieu of this
"world", and whose structure and function is mostly a not understood
black box, are supposed to solve the riddles of life and universe in the span
of a long millenary series of human lives. And this thanks mainly to the
"scientific" brain that "evolved" only the last 400 years.
Among the latest ambitious attempts to find substitutes for religion, claiming
to be based on science, we find psychoanalysis and anthroposophy that are less
than 100 years old. Individual lives dispose of a time span of maximum about 80
years during which the same kind of brain that may not even understand one's
own husband or wife or closest relatives, causes thousands of conflicts, has
caused (by "chance"?) two world wars with their, say, hundreds of
millions of homicides, and thousands of technical disastrous incidents due or
attributed to the "human factor". And we don't ask what would have
happened if a nuclear war had conflagrated under the direction of The Brain Bank of America and corresponding
Soviet organs during critical periods of the cold war between West and East, as
during the Cuban
Missile Crisis.
This human brain is supposed ("believed") to be able to judge, as the
physicist Carlo Rovelli does in his The Order of Time (e.g. chap. 12), the whole humanity's historical beliefs and solve the
riddles of the universe with the help of an exclusive and misunderstood
mathematics and logic. This belief in the capabilities of an individual life
with the duration, on the average, of less than 80 years is supposed to allow
individuals among younger smart generations (on the average of an age less than
50 and schooled during 15-30) to disregard and (d)evaluate the supposedly
antiquated ethics and knowledge of their parents and elders, not to mention
forefathers. This is the more so when it is claimed that ethics does not
presuppose history and religion but, on the contrary, follows from evolutionary
necessities in a Darwinian and sociobiological struggle for survival, akin to
the ideas of a Universal
Darwinism.
What science and scientism does is to "explain" a minute fraction of
total phenomena, disregarding the rest including earlier findings, under the
presupposition that science in a successful process of "Darwinian"
continuous progress supersedes previous findings, continuing without
foreseeable limits of knowledge and approaching godly total knowledge. In our
age of scientistic or physicalist concern for "sustainability" and "climate
change" we could get more concerned with epistemological and theological
limits, and with what is not explained or not even considered. It is in
practice "explained away" or relegated to other areas of study such
as philosophy, psychology, sociology or political science, which are not
considered as to be real or genuine sciences. Politics, for instance, often is
also explained away by scientists and engineers who assume that all would be
alright if only politicians followed the scientists' recommendations, as
denounced in the famous paper by Churchman & Schainblatt The
researcher and the manager. A dialectic of implementation and its Commentaries. Concern for climate
change, motivated by facile pseudo religious Pantheism sophisticatedly launched in Baruch Spinoza's philosophy, may be an
alibi for disregarding more fundamental causes of the "Decline
of the West" and outlined in Catholic doctrine. As I did write elsewhere about the sterility of debates, a
15-years old climate activist in the video of her address to the World Economic Forum in January 2019 makes
it evident that concern for climate has become as strong as the earlier concern
for God's will and wrath, recalling in my mind Chesteron's discussed
quote that "A man who won’t believe in God will believe in anything". For instance, in the advertised future capabilities of "technological singularity", or
of neologistic "neuralinks".
Climate change and global waming can turn out to be basically a
theological question of the deadly sin of greed, and of lacking respect for the natural order of creation as well as
for our progeny's or Christianly understood "neighbours'" wellbeing.
The latter has been supplanted by our greed for present or short term
plundering profit. Facile Pantheism expressed as love for nature or mother Gaia instead of Jesus Christ alleviates today the consciences of lots of
irreligious people. They may make profit or consume from polluting industries,
driving or flying for tourism or business all over the world, while running and
discussing problematic simulations with computer
models of world climate, or discussing the possibility of assigning juridical
personality status to rivers, and such. All this while they claim
to worry for climate change that may affect their grandchildren
but ignore present, ongoing massive suffering
of neighbours or poors all over the world (illustrated or
exemplified by shocking videos and photos). Among other things, what has been
ignored is the estimated number of children who on the average have
been dying daily because of starvation and related causes, set against
the background of the rich Western’s pollution, as I point out in a
blog insert on climate change and global
warming.
Theology as the Queen
of the Sciences
The mathematician Jan Brouwer that I considered in my essay on Computers as embodied mathematics and logic, awoke for theology when witnessing the environmental problems in
his native Holland already at the beginning of the past century. Theology, including Scholasticism, until the late European Enlightenment, was "named 'The Queen of
the Sciences' and serving as the capstone to the Trivium and Quadrivium that young men were expected to
study. This meant that the other subjects (including Philosophy) existed
primarily to help with [sic] theological thought." It is also the case
that all this was a training that paved the way for later rigorous scientific
thought despite the "myths" about the Galileo affair (more on this
below). West Churchman writes (in The Systems Approach and its Enemies, p. 99) that his colleagues liked to argue endlessly as to what should be
required courses for our MBAs and that his answer was that he had
grave doubts about making any of the existing ones required, but that he had no
doubt that what should be required was a basic course in theology. Brouwer
understood that the basic problems of science and its applications were not to
be found in logic and mathematics but, rather, in theology and religion.
It is interesting to note that so late as year 2016, symptomatically in the
African continent where Christianity is thriving, an academic article could
bear the title Theology: Still a queen of science in the post-modern era. It claims that "Theology is just as
relevant today as it was in the time of Aquinas who called theology ‘the queen
of science’ although the knowledge-driven network society does not seem to be
in agreement." The argumentation meets, however, many of the difficulties
that I tried to summarize in my text specifically dedicated to Information
as debate, and
the question of the origin or gift of faith covered in the present paper.
Censorship
of Talk about Religion
I wrote above in the introduction that God and religion are often barred from
appearing in mass media and societal discourse. This is so to the point that
Swedish readers can find in one main secular morning newspaper Dagens
Nyheter (19 October 2910) a news chronicle (in Swedish) by a more
insightful journalist, with the title "Not wanting to know anything about our Judeo-Christian heritage is a
wisdom for moles". This can be seen as a paradoxical
sort of reverse of the Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of
publications that Catholics were forbidden to read, or as an analog to
the prohibition of Holocaust Denial
that in many countries has taken the
place of the earlier blasphemy against God himself. Even in a private WhatsApp-group of university colleagues of which I was a member, repudiation of
references to God and religion were motivated by supposed dangers that
"identitarian" opinions risk to offend people. It all recalls the
infected spirit of political correctness. It was done without closer
explanations of what identitarian means, except for claiming that it
had not anything to do with the equally obscure identitarian movement.
My own hypothesis is that these
dangers have more to do with postmodern identity politics, and are experienced by people who do not have a sound psyche with a core
for their personality, having instead an individual self-identity anchored, as
expressed in analytical psychology, in a weak ego, totally distanced from an
unconscious self. So, they do not join social ideal movements,
parties and "-isms" (including the Christianism of false
conversions!?) so much because of shared values, as because sharing nice or
politically correct values makes their ego feel as belonging
to a collective "body" or group that bestows value, personal dignity
that is social, and (collective political) power, boasting the
ego. (Just one example for Swedish readers here, from Metro October 25th
2018).
It is this that allows, for instance, a young woman in her late teens or early
twenties, with scanty life experience, to achieve popularity and self-esteem
proper for a braggart, by claiming that childish adults' typical schoolyard
bickering implies scandalous and dangerous #MeToo abuse. [Swedish readers
can see R. Poirier Martinsson in Metro, October 31st 2018, p. 2]. And she starts
broadcasting feminist slogans that she has probably absorbed from a disgruntled
mother, This may also be the case of the 15-years old schoolgirl Greta
Thunberg, displaying autistic behavior that is described as typical also for so called "indigo
children" or child prodigies, who could
suddenly become a world famous crowd-driven climate-activist, broadcasting
climate-panicking slogans inspired by concerned if not disgruntled frightened
adults. At the same time a paradox arises when religious voices in the Swedish
Church's journal Spira claim that the schoolgirl can be seen as God's prophet,
just as decadent trends of feminist theology claim that movement "Metoo is a great Jesus-like stuff".
At the same time Swedish readers can witness the related effects of atheism on
a nihilistic or pantheistic philosophizing in Scener ur Hjärtat [Scenes out of the Heart] by Thunberg & Ernman (2018
ff., esp. p. 212 ff): that after death we only soullessly
"survive" through our imprints on the world's climate. A saddening
and depressing message to the young generation. A Swedish newspaper article explains and counters the criticism
of this Enrman-Thumberg approach by allegating that such
critics are also anti-feminists and anti-immigrants. This suggests deep
socio-cultural and therefore also theological roots of the question that I
partially survey in other texts of mine on the MeToo and Climate-alarm phenomena.
The individual's identity is then equated to the network of relations to a
group of others (say, "-isms" as feminists or climate activists),
physical-biological objects, akin to a relationism that tends to turn psychology into sociology where the most
favorable and sophisticated interpretation of relationism is, in my
understanding, in terms of George Herbert Mead. Since the self is then felt as a
function of a group, all questioning of the group and the belonging to the
group is felt as an abuse of one own's identity
(cf. identitarianism) or (coreless) individuality. The abuse then hooks up
to a nebulous "abuse industry" and requires an equally
nebulous political
correctness, which in our case prohibits questioning
of "fanatic-extremist" allegiances to religion (fundamentalism) as
much as, say, to ethnicity (racism) or gender (feminism), all relying on the
force of "conscience" as arbiter of truth. More on "conscience
and truth" below.
In a skillful account of the above mechanism, the by now famous
Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson writes in the context of the
so-called "Jewish Question" (being later object of debate
in another convolute paper):
First, psychologically speaking: why do the reactionary conspiracy theorists
even bother? This is a straightforward matter. If you are misguided enough to
play identity politics, whether on the left or the right, then you require a
victim (in the right-wing case, European culture or some variant) and a
perpetrator (Jews). Otherwise you can't play the game (a YouTube video I made
explicating the rules can be found here). Once you determine
to play, however, you benefit in a number of ways. You can claim
responsibility for the accomplishments of your group you feel
racially/ethnically akin to without actually having to accomplish anything
yourself. That's convenient. You can identify with the
hypothetical victimization of that group and feel sorry for yourself and
pleased at your compassion simultaneously. Another unearned victory. You
simplify your world radically, as well. All the problems you face now have
a cause, and a single one, so you can dispense with the unpleasant difficulty
of thinking things through in detail. Bonus. Furthermore, and most
reprehensibly: you now have someone to hate (and, what's worse, with a good
conscience) so your unrecognized resentment and cowardly and incompetent
failure to deal with the world forthrightly can find a target, and you can feel
morally superior in your consequent persecution(see Germany,
Nazi for further evidence and information).
For the rest, censorship of talk about religion reduces it to politics as
addressed in the coming nest section of this text, below. More than so, it
makes political analysis itself logically impossible. This is shown in a masterly
but at the same time bewildering analysis by Ian Buruma of the famous #MeToo-related case of
a sexual assault by Jian Ghomeshi (cf.
my own analysis of #MeToo) that led Buruma to be fired as
editor of the New York Review of Books. Buruma's in my view excellent
analysis attemps to keep religion out of the discussion but it pops
up when he writes (for readers of these lines: "Intelligenti pauca"):
Considering people who have fallen from grace — again, often for very good
reasons — it is hard to avoid using religious language. The way out of moral
ignominy is to be redeemed. But redemption has to be earned by confession,
self-reflection and apology. This is why people caught in a history of
sexual misbehaviour usually issue an apology straight away, sometimes
a rather slippery one: “If I have offended anyone . . . ,” etc. I was only
an offender by proxy, as it were. [...]
What is true about anti-racism is equally true of movements against sexism or
against any other form of hateful prejudice. A change in
outward behaviour is not enough. Or, rather, people assume
that behaviour will only change once an inner transformation has
taken place. I suspect there is a strong Protestant element in this. Public
confession is typically a Protestant tradition; Catholics prefer to fess up in
the privacy of the confessional.
Analogous to the case of the 15 years old
girl mentioned above, is the case of a likewise prodigiously precocious smart
young girl with the code-name "Soph" (earlier "Lieutenant Corbis"),
displaying what resembles "indigo-traits", who opened her YouTube channel at age 11 and having at
age 14 (in April 2019) about 800.000 subscribers, having added up to 15 million
views across 39 videos (examples here and here). However, she did not subscribe
to identity group politics. Even so, or just therefore, she was hardly criticized with the consequence of having a
video deleted from YouTube , and was labeled as belonging to the
"alt-right", "far-right" or "online right", as in
the overview in The New Statesman (26 April 2019).
In turn this generated supportive counteropinions (example here and here). I think her case illustrates that whenever (pertaining to a) religion
is avoided by means of group identity or by courageous individualism
(reacting to paradoxes of "political correctness"), the result is the
forced reduction of it all to inconsequential politics in sterile debates, and,
as in these cases, to the exploitation of children for political purposes.
In fact, the whole issue of climate change and global
warming with its exploitation of children and censorship of religious discourse
has become a platform for the reduction of religion to politics, (the subtitle
of the next section of this paper). An article of the Swedish liberal
newspaper Dagens Nyheter on 10 October 2019 "Klimatkampen är en humanism"
[Swedish for "The struggle for climate is a humanism"] biasedly
summarizes and comments several earlier articles on climate change and global
warming (6 February, 27 May and especially 28 September). There had been
earlier criticism against a posthumanistic, supposed conflict between "nature" and a supposedly anthropocenic "human species". The
criticism had claimed that such conflict, claiming that humans must
"listen to science" disregards the fact that science cannot answer
philosophical and cultural questions [note: not specifically including censored
religious ones], and that reduces humans at the same level and priority as
other animals (forgetting the famous censored Genesis 1:27). The article then counters this criticism by attributing
"humans" to different groups that act upon and are affected by
climate in different ways: poor and oppressed people in poor countries, versus
affluent oppressors including capitalists owning for instance the 100 companies responsible for 70% of
the world's greenhouse gas emissions. So, the conflict is not
between future generations and humanism-freedom-democracy here and now, or
between man's and nature's own interests, or between geologists and
environmentalists who abuse the neologism "anthropocene", or as humanity & democracy versus nature's own rights [sic]
implying that humanity overvalues itself. It is, rather an undeserved privilege
for us "urban people in the modernity" to deny climate change because
it spoils our philosophical activities, to be allowed to dedicate ourselves to
culture, philosophy and the human, while nature keeps silent as a scenography
behind the ongoing drama. The conflict is rather between "we" good
people who want to save the lives of those poor oppressed people who already
suffer climate catastrophes all over the world, and those others ill-advised or
evil people who do not care and do not listen to or "believe in" the
last decade's advertised consensus among a majority of climate experts. (I have
treated this in a blog.) Climate activism is therefore seen as a humanism, which also requires
conscious anti-fascism [so, guilt
by association]. And finally comes the only allowed
reference to unpronounced "existentialism" instead of censored religion:
it is said that this activism can also be seen as a struggle against
"existential perversion": a faithful believer [no mention of
believing in what - in "existence"? or in whom?] could call it a crime
against "creation" [pantheistic mother Earth?, avoiding the
censored word Creator].
In this way the New Testament's censored Matthew 7:3, and 5:43-44, the struggle against egoism and human
greed, self-criticism, and the love of our neighbour, is reduced to love
of mother Earth, politics or hate of political opponents. The wishful saving of
lives of poor and oppressed supposed refugees and migrant victims of worsening
climate in the nonmodern world, however, can be contrasted to the about 40.000
abortions performed yearly by good people, only in Sweden. But we saw how
censorship of religion leads to politics. But before that, how it leads to
science.
Reduction of religion to science
Besides the old
established Theology, a discipline has been created in modern universities with
the label of Psychology of Religion, with
the curious alternative of religion being often equated to Spirituality (and further associated to Spiritualism and Spiritism). It
is further associated to the adjective existential
coming from existentialism about which Wikipedia writes that it is “a form of philosophical inquiry” associated with
several 19th- and 20th-century European philosophers who shared an emphasis on
the human subject, despite often profound differences in thought. I suspect
that such terminology amounts to an attempt to philosophize religion and its
classical study by theology, which lead e.g. to Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy whose secularization of religion did not prevent
Germany’s Holocaust, and to further dissociate it from centuries of past
thought by means of further reduction to other fields or subjects, whatever
they became or should have become. This process of secularization of religion
does unexpectedly and imperceptibly reveals itself in such expressions as in
the first reader’s criticism (in Swedish) of my essay on informational aspects
of the Russia-Ukraine conflict: He writes “I have always seen
Christianism as a religion for humanism”. That is, Christianism at the service
of the highest value of humanism. With humanism implicitly identified with the
god Democracy. As when an atheist publishes a violent attack on Jesus Christ in
the Swedish magazine Humanisten.
Such process can be illustrated by dwelling in the
content of the discipline of Religionspsykologi
[Psychology of Religion] as represented by (now professor emeritus) Owe Wikström at
Uppsala University. Wikström is also priest and psychotherapeut. In Wikipedia
he is introduced as follows:
Wikström
is known in the field of religious studies for his research on the relationship
between religion and various clinical psychological conditions, such as trauma
and phobias. He has also conducted research on modern authorship and classical
composers using social constructivist and psychodynamic theories. He is
particularly concerned with the individual-culture interaction in the
interpretation of religious experience. In addition to scholarly publications,
he has written some twenty books on music, literature, art and popular culture.
I see Wikström as an extremely gifted sort of polymath
who has certainly comforted and inspired many mentally stressed or exposed
people in the extremely secularized Sweden, helping them to approach religion.
And this is fortunately far from the examples of extremely
gifted polymaths who abound in the fields related to the computer
field. Those who understand Swedish can appreciate his charisma by seeing and
hearing his being interviewed by a Jesuit pater here. He
has reported a brilliant academic career and in his most recent book (in
Swedish) Gliporna I minnets korridorer,
with the whole title that can be translated as - The glimpses in the corridors of memory - a professor of religion looks
back telling about his life and development of his thinking and feeling. He
is in part influenced by Hjalmar Sundén and
his social
constructivist role theory
. I myself had once interviewed Sundén because of
information on his familiarity with Carl Jung’s psychology, but the latter is
neither mentioned nor applied in the social construction of roles. In Jung’s
analytical psychology roles belong to
the persona part of the human psyche and is its face towards the
outer world, to be balanced against anima/animus that
are its face toward the collective unconscious. The whole is supposed to lead
to the ego’s integration with the self, which contains God’s archetype, which
is the core of question in this context of ours. For our purposes a summarizing
idea, more superficial than dwelling into Jung’s Collected Works is offered by Wikipedia:
Both final stages of animus and anima
development [balanced against the persona; my note] have dynamic qualities
(related to the motion and flux of this continual developmental process),
open-ended qualities (there is no static perfected ideal or manifestation of
the quality in question), and pluralistic qualities (which transcend the need
for a singular image, as any subject or object can contain multiple archetypes or even seemingly antithetical
roles). They also form bridges to the next archetypal figures to emerge, as
"the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new
symbolic form, representing the Self".
This is something else than the meeting of God by the
mediation of several archetypal roles suggested by the subject psyche’s
interaction with the outer world. In my understanding, the best interpretation
of this social constructivist approach would be the Hindu psyche’s meeting with
the various polytheistic Hindu gods, and this would indicate the Hindu
influence on Sundéns and Wikström’s conception, a conception that opens an outer interaction that tends to become
politics (see below the next chapter/section). And science itself after the
Enlightenment is a turning of western man towards the outer world, at the
expense of the inner one which, however, does not disappear but influences the psyche
and behavior in an unperceived unconscious way. A turning from a Jungian to
Freudian psychology does not help because the latter has a materialistic
basis and is even more outer-directed opening even the way to Freudo-Marxism and to other problems already sensed in the Catholic
study of Conscience and Truth. To be compared today to the common societal chat on
the undesirability of guilt and shame, or blame and
shame.
This turning “outwards” is also incorporated in the
turning of religion into science by means of the label of psychology of religion, which also is understood as the science of religion. If one considers
that theology already was the established denomination for the philosophy of
religion, and that psychology from the beginning was part of philosophy, one
can perceive this process of scientification of
religion, the more so considering that psychology has today split further into
a multitude of psychologies or psychological schools. In this respect there
seems to be an analogy with Eros that became Sex, that became sexology and
further gender
studies, in Sweden even daring to end into being gender science (genusvetenskap).
All this forgetting many core dimensions of the problem as I try to depict in
the context of Reason and Gender, where I try to reconduct the question to the by then
forgotten religion itself, countering the drive to politics through the by now
west-worldwide movement of feminism.
A way of understanding the impact of the discipline of
scientific Psychology of Religion is
to reflect on how it was and is institutionalized as academic discipline. If,
as Aristotle wrote, one swallow makes no summer, the idea of scientification of religion is not
productive except for the illusion that religion can be reduced to science.
After some
academic struggles I myself guess of having failed to implant a
tradition of an ethically grounded discipline of informatics in a Swedish
university environment. It had motivated me to write down some “Jubilee
reflections” on occasion of my retirement. Certain academic
activity may be well-intentioned, useful or profitable but does not need to be
performed at a university that administers a tradition born out of theology as
the “queen
of sciences”.
We may take a look at today’s situation at the
University of Uppsala, two names related to psychology of religion are prof. Valerie
DeMarinis, and asst. prof. Andreas Önver Cetrez.
The former appears as following in the renamed
position of Wikström as professor in psychology
of religion and cultural psychology at Uppsala University. In a home
page at the Institute for Democracy and Dialog IDEDI she is presented as prof. in public mental health and Clinical Medicine
and “a board member of the section on Psychiatry, Religion and Spirituality of
the World Psychiatry Association. She has a special research focus in
intervention- and prevention program evaluation, using a mixed-method
design. Through the public mental health promotion focus of her research,
identifying resources for well-being and resilience in a community framework
are primary concerns for addressing societal problems related to mental ill
health, loss of meaning-making resources, and for addressing the multi-level
needs related to patterns of attraction to violent radicalization.”
The latter co-authored with Owe Wikström a book (in
Swedish) on Inspiration to psychology of
religion, dealing with palliative medicine, rituals of death, migration and
adaptation, mysticism, and alternative states of consciousness. He details
further his scientific activities on another page
(accessed on 9 september 2022) as: “In my research I
have primarily used the disciplines of psychology of religion, cultural
psychology, and ritual studies. My scientific activity so far has been to
contribute both empirically as well as theoretically to topics related to
ethnic and religious identity, meaning-making, ritualization, acculturation,
religion and conflict studies, refugee health and acculturation, in all cases
most strongly in relation to migration populations in postmodern and
secularized societies.”
In browsing the pages mentioned above, I
also saw couplings to the Norwegian VID-institute and, for instance, prof. Tormod Kleiven, at the Center of Diaconia and
Professional Practice, reporting as his academic disciplines, Social Work
and Theology. As “Subjects” he reports Forgiveness, Leadership, Pastoral Care and
Counselling, Power, Reconciliation, Science of diaconia, Sexual
Abuse/Misconduct, Shame. (Cf. a discussion of the concept of diaconia, here.) I found also a
coupling to the Nordic Network for Research in Faith and Health, with a
corresponding list of “ad hoc” research projects.
My impression is that this illustrates how
theology and philosophy reduced to disciplines of psychology or science of
religion is further reduced to a bunch of sub-fields, techniques and methods
for addressing opportune new or contemporaneous problems that, in turn, allow
for the researchers’ application for temporarily available financial funds that
legitimize the actual research at the verge of becoming guidelines for societal
administration and welfare. I see this as a flight from religion. This recalls
the basic explanation of the branching
of sciences as advanced by Jan Brouwer as explained
in my study of computers as embodiment of mathematics: “Every branch of
science will therefore run into deeper trouble; when it climbs too high…” When Brouwer’s idea is adapted to the case of climbing up
to the human
“Ego” it is no longer clear what does it mean
that a science is “climbing too high” as meaning climbing up to a godly Ego, as
it is taken for granted in modern science after the Enlightenment.
This indicates for me that the cause for
Wikström adopting role theory, if it was not its social constructivism, it may
have been an inclination for aestheticism and need for a theatrical catharsis,
which at the time of Aristotle could well do without the commitment implied in
Christianism’s approach to the meaning of human tragedy. And this fits well in
Wikström’s life story allowing for a brilliant career within the Swedish
extremely secular cultural sphere with his parallel almost simultaneous roles:
professorship in science of psychology, priesthood for (psychology of)
religion, and artistic aesthetics in (history of) art, music and literary
authorship. All this disregarding the meaningful fact that it was mainly his
role in science as university
professor that fostered career and success. The particular mix of roles in a
disciplinary university recalls in my mind the proverb that “In the land of the
blind, the one-eyed man is king”. It is something that becomes evident in
chapters 10 to 13 (e.g. p. 212). of his mentioned latest book, where an
“administrative-positivistic” view of PhD education seems to be
unproblematically endorsed. This impression is reinforced by the relative lack
of analysis or comments on effects on the particular discipline of the crisis
in the university world, which I have witnessed a sizable amount of effort
(texts found here and here).
For me this is already a well-known avenue
of escape identified in the reduction of
Kantian aesthetics to design, where aesthetics is
the judgmental synthesis of Pure and Applied Reason, All this leading to a
hoped-for secular Aristotelian catharsis instead of a doubtful religious salvation, all in the absence of a
committed lived Christianism. Under such presuppositions it is not deemed to be
necessary to dwell deeper into analytical psychology despite of being (see
above) “particularly concerned with the individual-culture
interaction in the interpretation of religious experience”. William James wrote The varieties of religious experience. The
distance of Wikström to James’s pragmatism allows for an extensive and
intensive aesthetical if not aestheticist speculations far from pragmatism
living many roles that were available neither for Christian martyrs not for
combatants in the Thirty Years’
War. They chose between the role of Catholic
or Protestant, since many roles are not available for soldiers that today
sacrifice their lives in wars for independence and democracy. They cannot live
many roles at once, such as priest, artist scientist, psychotherapist and
author. Prof. Jordan Peterson (see further below) did not support the triple
role of professor-scientist, psychotherapist and activist. He sacrificed the
first two, and not opting for priesthood he risked and risks to fall or be
trapped in the political struggle. If multi-role players follow their own
conscience they cannot flee from the embarrassing problem of the theological relation between
conscience and truth.
And here in mentioning pragmatism we have
a possible interpretation of the symptoms distancing such psychology of
religion from pragmatism: no positioning in controversial psycho-social
problems exemplified by rape, gang crime, divorce, abortion, gender dysphoria,
polyamory, suicide, or (God forbid it) the solution of terrorism in the meeting
between Islamist immigrants and secularized western Christians, or the evaluation of the military conflict in
Ukraine. One can wonder, by the way what did prevent psychology of religion
to address the conflict in Ukraine at least during its first eight months. I
myself understood that the religious psychologist authoring such a report would
probably be academically and “culturally “cancelled” as I was canceled by some supposed friends and colleagues after the
publication of my
essay on the subject, a pragmatist discussion of the conflict
with a sufficient number of (controversial?) biblical references. Not even
catholic priests in my Stockholm’s parish of S:ta Eugenia
could afford or dared to comment my text.
In summary: this was about the attempt to
escape by reducing religion and theology to universitarian science,
psychological or other. But there are other attempts to escape.
A case for study of Psychology of Religion
I sent to a friend of mine who for almost
all his life has been a self-declared atheist, a hint to read the above
mentioned book by Owe Wikström The
glimpses in the corridors of memory. I felt that if
he as atheist was so convincingly skeptical about religion, the book could
allow him to approach it, in view of his earlier assurances that he was indeed
atheist but was intrigued by what made people “religious”. He had told me
repeatedly that he wanted to understand their thought, their way of thinking. I
thought that the testimony of a main religion psychologist (if not religious
psychologist?), who is equally priest and psychotherapist, could be for him a
bridge to understanding religious people, in view of his struggle for
understanding them, despite of dissenting.
The question is what does mean to
“understand”, as when people say that they do understand somebody but do not
agree. It has something to do with the discussion of the difference between understanding and explaining, which I find that
it is not clearly and directly addressed in Wikipedia’s coverage of understanding vs. explanation. It would be a good question for psychologists of religion and it may
have been addressed in their literature even if I have not seen it done. A
genuine good poet may write a poem that calls forth our tears, but does he
understand us, or (even less) help us, or just touches something common to our collective
unconscious with risk of making things worse? How and
why does a true and good religion, and which one, cure and solace us in our
distress, if it does it?
Returning to our case, I suggested my
friend the reading of the book, and knowing that he is an engineer and several
of my friends are logically, mathematically and technically gifted as
pertaining to the environment of my past educational background. He answered
I think that our dialogue is symptomatic of how difficult it is for
Christians to see the atheistic perspective. You yourself speak of my
"struggling" to understand which implies that I feel that there is
something extremely important to understand - that I am waging a struggle to
understand. That's not how I experience my desire to understand at all, it's
more of an interest or pure curiosity - a serious curiosity or a desire to
understand how my thought went wrong, if it did. Maybe a kind of intellectual
safeguard. But I may be over-interpreting your use of the word
"struggles".
One interesting thing is that when I in
earlier occasions claimed that for him it was important to show by logical
means that he was right and his counterpart wrong, he had claimed that it was
not the case. He only wanted to understand his counterpart, how he thought
differently. But now he says that he did not want to understand the
counterpart, or prove that he was wrong, but only to know where he himself had
gone wrong. [Or “hade indeed gone right, and therefore the counterpart gone
wrong”, which is not explicitly stated.]
This position is confirmed as my friend
quoted from his own text in a letter to another scientifically trained and
convinced Christian believer:
It was clear from my life description [mailed previously] that I am not
a "seeker" but a convinced atheist. To such person it is pointless to
quote the Bible and talk about pride and bowing the knee. You don't do that in
front of what I see as a purely hypothetical entity. On the other hand, I am
clearly interested in how it happens that e.g. you and I come to such different
opinions.
One can note a sort of logical tautology
in that “If an atheist is convinced, then it is pointless to quote the Bible
for him” since conviction means that he does not care for the Bible”. And who
is to judge “conviction” if not one’s own conscience? And who cares about what
“conscience” is or should be in relation to
“truth”, as it guided even the perpetrators of the Holocaust? This is only one
example of the implied belief and conviction of one’s own prior logic
argumentation as explained in my other texts on Debate logic and
on Logic as rape.
Furthermore, as an answer to my suggestion of reading Wikströms latest book he
wrote:
Wikström was interesting [in his video interview], but I didn't perceive
any deeper explanation for why he became a believer. In addition to a religious
growing up environment, he spoke about the feeling of something sacred which I
can also get, but the step from there to include a special religious teaching
seems to me to be very big. He, like you, also talked about tone deafness [as analog to music, for religion – my note], which
seems reasonable, but it becomes another reason against a belief in God. Would
an almighty God create creatures that have a constitution that makes them
unable to receive his message, it’s strange.
Whose ending I commented that it must have
felt strange for him since he considers humans as deterministically conditioned
and does not believe in free will. It would be the reason for not always
willing to do what one is able to do, leading in turn to que question of
willing vs. understanding in the human psyche. Which would be a matter for the psychology
of a religion reduced to science, if not for good old theology and philosophy
to take care of.
For terminating this report of the “case”:
I wrote to my friend that I would account for our exchange of views in this
essay as did above. I wanted to do this in order that the exchange would not
benefit only both of us privately, and would “perpetuate” in writing his own
thoughts despite of their necessarily been taken partly out of the greater
context of our correspondence. He answered (my trans. and italicized emphasis):
You take loose quotes, as you say, out of context. You
are commenting on these quotes which thus do not give a fair picture of what I
think. The fact that you then sometimes even misinterpret them does not improve
matters. Even I, who am in the know, have difficulty following your train of
thought. You have hardly "perpetuated" my views and how anyone who is
not familiar with our email exchange can derive anything of value from this -
"shall benefit many" - is beyond me. If you want to project the image
of a crazed atheist, you might succeed, but what's the point?
If you really wanted to perpetuate my views, surely it
would be reasonable for you to ask me to summarize my thoughts in a concise and
coherent way and then ask me to comment on your comments so that your comments
were not based on any misconceptions. Only then should it have any value to a
reader. If you wanted, I could make a detailed comment on what you wrote to
explain what went wrong but I wonder if that makes sense. After all, you are
not interested in improving your writing and
such an effort would take a lot of time for me.
But I am grateful that at least here you do not make
any attempt to psychologize me,
always something
In other words: I perceive that I am told
that I am wrong but nothing is clarified and corrected as it would have to be
done if I, the author, had been already dead, as it happens to be the case with
most texts on faith vs. atheism. This may help to understand the phenomenon of
hard-core atheism and illustrate the tragic hopelessness of communication on
the issue since it relates to other texts of mine where I gather and comment my
observations of similar cursory exchanges of thoughts. This is done in this very
same essay and in Information and Debate, Logic as Rape vs. Truth and Love, and Information on: Christianism or Atheism.
In the latter, I report one short and one
extended exchange of e-mails between the members of two pairs of academically
trained colleagues who summarize their
thoughts in a concise and coherent way and then ask each other to comment their
comments so that their comments will not be based on any misconceptions. And
this continued until one of them in each pair, one of them avowed believer (one
Christian and the other anthroposopher) and the other atheist, suddenly refused
to continue the dialog because they found that there was no “common ground” for
continuing it in their respective pair. And they could not or did not dare to
define what such common ground, is or
should be. My hypothesis is that it should be religion, giving the basic common presuppositions and reasons for humans to
relate to each other (and to nature) and what to talk about. So much for conciseness and coherence vs. misconceptions.
Reduction of religion to politics
Jordan Peterson himself, mentioned above, shies away from adducing
theology in debates, as I remarked in another text of mine dealing with the hopeless
issue of debates. It is especially visible in extended videos such as the three
hours' Joe Rogan Experience #1208, or the one and a half hours' From
the Barricades of the Culture Wars, where the Christian exhortation to balance between justice vs. mercy is
framed (at 1:21, 2:20 hours, respectively 1:20 from the beginning) in
"rational" terms of rightist vs. leftist political activism. Peterson
goes so far astray as to pronounce, in a discussion on “Equity”, what I consider a
definitely misleading statement: “And
we should well remember that “reasonable political discussion” is the only alternative we have to outright
strife and the kind of conflict that tends to degenerate rapidly and
dangerously” (my italics).
This is equivalent to wrongly believe that one can do away with (talk
about) religion. In this sense this is also the risk of misunderstanding and
bringing in "natural
theology" into cultural discourse, as done in Sweden by Jesuit pater Ulf
Jonsson (Svenska Dagbladet 15 Jan 2018). In my opinion this
wrong belief may become evident by asking what is the difference and relation
between Peterson's 12
Rules for Life, the Ten
commandments, the Categorical imperative, the
Twelve-step Program originated with Alcoholics Anonymous
(AA), and the need for Psychotherapies. It may offer temporary rhetorical
"self-help" success but ultimately reinforce sterile
debate and criticism against Peterson as
happened in Sweden when clergy from the Church
of Sweden joined (in Swedish texts) atheists and other critics in mass media. This is analog to the other Christian
(right's) video-attack such Peterson being "an
Antichrist false prophet", as if Thomas the Apostle were
an AntiChrist false prophet (John 20:24-27).
The deleterious and dangerous effects of shying away from openly adducing
religion are displayed in the most violent way in the attacks upon Peterson
such as coming from nowhere (or the Left?) such as by a disgruntled former colleague, or from the "Right" in a video
published by "Resurrection Europa" on Jan 24, 2019 with the
title Jordan Peterson DISMANTLED. (An alternative source at Reddit: here.) In the latter Peterson is presented as
an anti-nationalist, anti-European, and anti-white, who implements a stratagem
combining self-help advice, political ideology, and religion. He is seen (after
the video's 12th minute) as in a mind trap of political ideology
disguised in a self-help regime wrapped in religious metaphors. It does not
help that he himself denounces that ideologies are essentially fragmented
religions (which he does not dare to adduce). He is still seen as pushing his
own ideology or radical individualism. The paradox for me is
also that, as he himself acknowledges it, he is attacked from both the Right
and the Left, from both Jews and anti semites, and so on, everybody trying
to recruit him for his own political purposes. Everything is reduced to
socio-political intricacies exemplified in further debates in Quora,
including the constructed impossible problem of rightly "understand Marxism". The paradox dissolves, however,
when one understands why Jesus Christ did enhance neither race nor nationalism,
and why he did found neither a nation nor a political party. Then it
becomes clear that what is named radical individualism is only the claim that
insight and peace cannot come from the outside of the human
being, as forced by politics, police or military power, or its analog such
as crusades, Inquisition or fundamentalist Jihad. It is the coming from a religious
conversion by love from the inside, which is wrongly seen as
(radical) individualism. As outlined in the encylical letter Caritas in Veritate, all
this does not mean that religion is a substitute of politics, but that what is
good, right, and necessary does not follow political party lines that, for the
rest, are not two-dimensional right-left.
I am convinced that Peterson shies away from theology in debates because of a
perceived rhetoric impossibility of mentioning theology in a secular context
where religion itself is wrongly considered as socially divisive despite of
being an ultimate attempt to talk about and to reconcile ultimate values. This
may be the reason of why "Jordan Peterson is More Popular that Most Churches", while it explains also the strong oppositions he meets in
traditional Christian-religious quarters who see him as an "Uncertain Prophet" and do not see how he can be seen
as, and made into an ally. Nevertheless, Peterson seems to have finally
confronted the need of being more explicit about religion, as in a later video
of May 2019. There he declares, for instance, after
speaking about his dislike for the question "Do you believe in God?",
that he thinks that Catholicism is "as sane as people can get.” His option
towards Catholicism also clarifies why he does not relate to some Eastern
thought or "transrationality" for escape from politics, as some
of his critics would expect him to do.
Peterson might also have found a way, like the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous
- AA - to talk about a "higher
power" that miraculously leads people
to God as I know that the AA has done with some alcoholics despite of
being cursed by others, militantly atheists. Indeed, in the
absence of God, religion tends to be considered as just another group among
many. This is so for those who have not and do not want or are not open to the
gift of faith (cf. Pascal, above), as for the many who are not able to trust,
to love or accept to be loved. This goes along with a misunderstanding of the
concept of group as when radical feminism conceives "patriarchal"
oppression without ever reflecting upon the possible meaning of patriarchy in
the cultural discourse as exemplified by Eric J. Leed's The
Mind of the Traveler (pp. 224-225, 246-248).
Awareness of, and respect for censorship of religious discourse opens the door
to the remarkable popularity of endless and hopeless "intellectual
debates" based on attacks and comments such
as exemplified in the English language sphere by texts in the sites of Toronto's Star (by Bernard Schiff, May 25, 2018)
and Esquire (by Wesley Yang, May 1, 2018).They
become in fact naive attempts to create new lay religions on the basis of new
gods such as "Free Speech" or "Democracy", or to spoil the
old ones with the fanatism of false conversions, when not creating
more or less murderous or intellectually crippling political ideologies. Recent
examples are those prophetized by lay pessimistic or optimistic
Jesus-like characters such as Dan Ariely and Yuval
Harari, professors of behavioral economics,
respectively history; and by later constantly upcoming new younger and bright
secular prophets such as one writing on "secular faith and spiritual freedom".
A substantial and intellectually sophisticated alternative is Alain
de Botton's Religion for Atheists, which builds upon utilitarian Nietzschean-Heideggerian suggestions that
art, literature, architecture and music be substitutes for religion. Such lay
approaches, less or more sophisticated, should be contrasted to
sincerely deepgoing and passionate search for truth in authors with
remarkable works, such as Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Pär Lagerkvist, and Simone Weil, each one in his sphere of influence. It
is by the way Lagerkvist in his struggle on religion who captured the idea (p.
141 in his Det besegrade livet, The defeated life,
my trans.) that "even if the research has never reached this far, never to
such results, then it has managed to aim higher, towards more important
goals". The fact is in my modest range of knowledge I have not seen any
intellectual analysis concluding that they went wrong in these authors'
desperate and genuine search for truth in faith and Christianity.
Regarding the above mentioned secular "gods" of Free Speech
and Democracy, they correspond in practice to Peterson's rhetorical reduction
of religion to a sort of dialectical balancing act between political Right and Left.
Their resurrection is divulgated in a pedagogical video by Claire Lehmann as
related to her journalistic-academic site Quillette.
Lehmann, who is understandably sympathized
in a video by Peterson, summarizes in another
video (minutes 09:50 ff.) what in my view
has become a problematic rhetorical "political religion". As
conceived by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning in the book The Rise of Victimhood Culture, (to be contrasted with the book Criticism of the negative
edification mentioned later in this text of mine), it is framed
in terms of "mistake theorists" vs. "conflict theorists",
that is, academic liberalism vs. Marxism.
On the track of historical figures such as Juan Donoso Cortés, and
Alexis de Tocqueville, the Swedish political
scientist Tage Lindbom with both Christian and Muslim sentiments
he expressed in many books, had already compared and denounced the historical
roots or failed political theories in his The Myth of Democracy (1996, esp. pp.
38ff., 92ff.) Such roots are seen as theologically, ethically, and
practically corrupt, not because of the devout idea of a godly democracy but
because of its failed prerequisites such as morality, education and
communication. (Related to The
City of God?)
This reinstates the importance of religion for those who are open to
Christianity and the message of the world's great religions, well beyond
criticism directed against Peterson from both "the Right" and the "the Left", reminding why for instance Jesus Christ
did not found a political party (or terrorist organization) for liberation from
the oppressive Roman empire. There lies also the reason for the crises of
(the modern god of) democracy and its paradoxes of free speech. It is a lack of
basic universal values, which are not the same as the invented human
rights, inherited and selected out of
Christianity, and supposedly "sanctified" or legitimized by the United Nations. It
is a juridical question of the relation between legal
positivism and natural
law that I already considered in a book
of mine (in Swedish) concerning rule
of law and systems development. Swedish
readers can appreciate the paradoxes decurring from such a
substitution of God by the god of democracy leading to "human rights"
in an article by the associate judge of appeal Daniel Bergström "Skilj på
lag och moral" ("Distinguish between law and morality", in Axess, nr. 1, 2021) which also relates to the case of Amy
Coney Barrett, associate justice of the Supreme Court
of the United States, and to my analysis of Swedish
"state individualism". Cf. also one of
the newspaper Dagens Nyheter's articles referenced
above (Lena Andersson, 28 september 2019). The article, with
secularized defective but logical arguments, had the misleading title "Demokratin är hotad om vetenskapen ensam ska
styra klimatpolitiken", i.e. "Democracy is threatened
if science alone will control climate policy", where it is meant
"...if politicians are only supposed to follow scientists' advices",
not completed with the dialectical counterpart "and the other way
round".
Case
study: politics is easier than religion
Long after completing the rest of this paper, in May
2021, while following a live transmission of a Catholic Holy Mass on the
Solemnity of Pentecost, I
listened to a sermon by a Jesuit pater. He explained the meaning of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the
Apostles and other disciples following the Crucifixion, Resurrection and
Ascension of Jesus Christ. The
Pentecost is
said to mark the rounding
of the Christian church as an institution, as a guide in Christian faith and
individual conscience. The former cardinal and later pope Benedict XVI also
indicated the Church as a guide for conscience as related to truth.
Considering that the
seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are
wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the
Lord, it occurred to me later that I could ask by e-mail the pater who gave the
sermon whether and how to invoke the Holy
Spirit in guiding a Catholic attitude to the recent renewed Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Information about it is
found in Wikipedia (as per May 25, 2021), but it is a highly controversial text having an “extended confirmed protection”, because
of the dangers of edit wars such as considered in
my criticism of Wikipedia in a study of “wikicracy”. In compensation there is a plethora of more and
less advanced material on the net. My
request was especially motivated by the fact that controversial questions like
this one are often if not always avoided in Sermons and in references to the
Bible in holy masses. This includes (are excluded!) also particular texts of
the Bible, such as the ones that are very relevant in our mentioned context, such as in the Deuteronomy, verses 7:16
ff., 13:15
ff., 20:10
ff., plus the “maledictions” at 28:15
ff. and 32:21, all
symptomatically avoided in the commentaries of The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, recalling the Holocaust and all displaying
embarrassing resemblances with the most controversial chapters and verses of
the often criticized Koran.
The Jesuit pater answered by mail as follows (my
translation):
The
question of the Israel-Palestine conflict is, as I can see from a
"strictly Catholic" point of view, a political question. That is, for
us Christians and Catholics, God's promises to the salvation-historical Israel
and through it to the world, have been fulfilled in Christ. The ritual and
ceremonial as well as the political part of the law of Moses is thus also
completed: the new salvation-historical Israel is the Church.
The
state of Israel is something else and something political. Here, the Church's
only overall view is probably that, on good grounds as a Christian, one can
come to slightly different positions, besides both peoples' right to live in
peace within recognized boundaries. On the how-question - how should this
happen? - there is no Catholic or ecclesiastical answer but only an answer
based on each person's own conscience based on the values by which it is shaped
by, as the question is not a question of absolute value but of what in English
is called "prudential judgment".
So,
feel free to discuss the Palestinian conflict as a political conflict - but as
a Christian and a Catholic do it just as politics, not as eschatology. From a
Catholic point of view - and I know that evangelicals see it differently here -
there is nothing eschatological in either Netanyahu or Abbas or the quarrel
over whether land should return to those who had it before 1948 or not.
I observe that this answer divorces religion from
politics while at the same time reducing religious matters to politics by means
of reference to conscience and to (subjective, equated to “conscience”) values
as involved in “prudential judgement”. Prudence or Phronesis are
Greek and typically Aristotelian (treated by Aquinas but
symptomatically being also Heideggerian)
terms that I have struggled with in an essay on “Chinese
information systems” (and here, and
here),
but it did not help, as I
later tried to show that the Kantian development of prudence in his
“third critique” (of judgment) did not help. By means of such a term one avoids
all the problems implied by my struggles on debate
in an essay
dedicated to the subject. This has been sensed in different terms in the
theological field, as in a text on Thomistic critique of abused categories,
published in the Church Life Journal of
the University of Notre Dame under the title “The
Collapse of the Intrinsic/Prudential Judgment Distinction”
(December 03. 2020). In a passus of the paper the author T. Scarpelli
Cory states for instance that: “Everything else is left in the “prudential” realm, where
disagreements cannot definitively be resolved, and thus reasonable people can
disagree—exactly what my students call “subjective opinion,” or the domain of
moral relativism.” In other words, today’s unused academic terms “prudential
judgment” and “escathological” become a subterfuge
for escaping both Kantian “reason” (as I considered in another
essay) and religion, in this
case Christian Catholicism, and for reducing religion to politics or to a
religion administered in political terms.
In fact the tendencies
of reducing religion to politics can be seen in the Catholic Church’s political
strifes around the Second Vatican Council as evidenced in the SSPX-Resistance, and the controversies involving the archbishop Carlo
Varia Viganò, with strong opinions including the covid-19 pandemics. In a “philosophy festival” held in May 2021,
Viganò testifies his commitment to the importance of the philosophy of Antonio
Livi, student of Etienne
Gilson, and with import for
the studies of history, of “being” (phenomenology?), and of science, law and economics. In doing so Livi
endorses a school of “common sense” included in Wikipedia’s account of schools of common sense but finally increases the mind-blowing complexity of his whole position, aloof from the
capabilities and interests of common people, by also subscribing to a
particular reform of logic, alethic modal logic. See below in the conclusions of my paper on Computerization as design of logic
acrobatics, about desperate attempt of reformed logic. All this leading to
barren false intellectualism, political conflict and flight from talk about
Christian love and caritas, in oblivion of the “common sense” of the New
Testament.
I would say that the
reduction to prudential judgment also can be seen as a facile (political) abuse
of the biblical Mark 12:17 or Matt 22:21, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what
is God’s.” where Caesar and God are indiscriminately identified as Abbas and
Netanyahu by their respective supporters. All this while it is forgotten why
“from the beginning” people wanted to have a Caesar (a king) instead of God and
his judges (1 Samuel 8), whereby authority of
divine love was replaced by worldly power, as in a Islamic theocracy as Islamic
arrangement, leading further down to Hannah Arendt’s sophisticated conception
of Power vs. Violence and therefore war. Regarding power, compare with my reference to it and to Fichte below. I believe that it was the tragedy of these
complications that led a most respected Swedish political scientist Tage
Lindbom (who inspired me to
write an essay on Belief and Reason) to convert to Islam rather than to Catholicism after
he witnessed the development of the Second
Vatican Council.
This can be the reason
why it is said (National Catholic
Reporter, April 9, 2016) that the Catholic church is moving away from just war theory, and why the answer to my original above mentioned
question to the Jesuit pater did not even refer to the theory of Just
War. In the worst case it
can also be a question of reversion to a controversial Jesuit position
represented by the history of La Civiltà Cattolica, also shared by Traditionalist Catholicism, a
sympathizer of which, for instance, claimed that my references to Deuteronomy
(above) displeases him: “I do not like your (admittedly quite implicit)
critique of GT's injunction against the destruction of the Canaanites, which
was imposed by God himself due to the abominations of various kinds which they
committed, among which are sodomy, child sacrifice, sorcery, etc. (cf. Leviticus 18 and Deuteronomy 18)”. To which I responded
claiming that this endorsement of violence implies a particular equalization of
the New and the Old Testament, and is a paradoxical attitude since La Civiltà Cattolica has been strongly
critical of Judaism at the limits of Anti-Judaism/Semitism. Such
equalization of Old and New Testaments forgets the distinction between devil and humans judged to be possessed by the devil, and
forgets e.g. any attempt of interpretation of “love your enemy” (Matthew
5:44) or of the
indissolubility of marriage (Matthew 19:7-8) leading to demonization
of enemies as also usually practiced in military training. It in turn allows
for their “destruction” as in modern wars, conflicts and even some divorces. It
disregards all sophisticated talk about just war, as it is obvious in the
conflict we are talking about. Intellectually too complicated? Not more
complicated, I think, that to grasp the meaning, practice, and efficacy of
“prudential judgment”.
I wonder whether in the
whole Bible could not be found a hint to a situation that is analog to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, allowing for a further personal elaboration of
the moral problem. Observe my troublesome
references to the Deuteronomy above. They appear to me as bearing analogies
to that conflict that some see as a consequence of “guilt-shamed” Western
politicians to let Palestinians pay for the crimes of the second world war and
Holocaust. Those who look for counseling and for support from established
clergy in burning personal and social issues related to politics and war, risk
to be left and abandoned to their own premises. It seems to be worse than as if
a Wehrmacht officer in face of Second World War considering an
impossible “conscientious
objection” asked for counseling
and had been at least directed to the matter of “Just war” in the Catholic
Catechism §§ 2312 ff. and to a treaty about
prudential judgment.
Case study: the Russia-Ukraine conflict
This study is the object of a separate text that is not included here for reason of economy of space, but is
introduced as follows:
Most of its initial lines were initially
written as an insert in my blog on 21 February 2022 while the world
press was reporting on the so called crisis in the relation of Russia to NATO regarding Ukraine. In the following days and weeks, the volume of my text grew up to the
point that it could not belong properly to a blog, requiring a separate essay
with a structure that portrays its development. It relates to my discipline of
information science in that it puts in evidence its most critical relationship
of information to social and political science, and ultimately to theology.
I only wish to advance some reflections
that I have not noticed in the media's reports and comments about this issue
and tragic consequences for all involved people. In doing so I do not claim any
special competence in political science, geopolitical foreign relations and
diplomacy. On the contrary I have had serious difficulties in understanding what
historically has been going on, for instance, in the dissolution of the state
of Yugoslavia, or in my parents’ native country Bulgaria,
e.g. during World War II affecting the destiny of my whole
family as refugees in Italy and Brazil and the suffering of relatives left in
Bulgaria, or the historical relations between Spain and France starting with
the Franco-Spanish
War. Not to speak of the historical relations
between Russia and Ukraine, and their relation to European events
and especially in the World War II, and so on (more on this below). I only
claim competence in discussing the meaning and problems of information (system)
about the conflict, problems beyond the strict technical-administrative details
of Internet-connections and disinformation in war.
My main message will be that the solution
of a serious conflict is not well understood in the examples from this case of
Russia vs. Ukraine. Extreme violence and deaths in ongoing wars as well as in
suicides testify that survival itself (in this world!) is not
the highest value. And life will be ultimately lost. Beyond
violence and the historical concept of “just war” what is required is an
insight into a rationality that justifies a spiritually grounded self-sacrifice
by all parties in the conflict, up to the extreme of martyrdom in the sense it has in Christianity.
Explaining Away Traditions and Religion
Among what is nowadays explained away is the meaning and importance of traditions that
include religion. As I explain in another
context with reference to "Chesterston's fence", there should be
"the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind
the existing state of affairs is understood." It is symptomatic that
traditions today are also explained away in the name of enlightened modernity.
A common present example is the feministic reform of life "roles" of
men and women and its relation to the so-called #MeToo campaigns
about which I have written in another
context. "Traditions are solutions to
forgotten problems. Remove the tradition and the problem returns." The
return of the forgotten problem is often misunderstood as a "side
effect", but it is rather an oversight inherent in what today is narrowly
understood as science, as explained in my overview of mathematization of science as
framed by Jan Brouwer.
One effect of explaining away religion is that ethical questions become the
concern of only political power and its police surveillance or, ultimately, war
such as the war against evil Nazism in the second world war, which is depicted
as having been exclusively ethically motivated. Swedish readers can ponder
the issue in a remarkable book by Tage Lindbom Fallet Tyskland [The
Case of Germany, Norma, 1988, ISBN 91 85846 92 9] with a very informative
international reference list (pp. 219-223) highlighting among others David Calleo's The German Problem Reconsidered, 1978. Few consider
that ethics must start from the individual and from an educated conscience (see below). Few ask themselves how
it comes that Jesus did not found a political party or worked for a revolution
or ultimately sheer war against the cruelty and debauchery in the Roman empire.
Another apparition of the explaining away (or self-censorship or trivializing)
of religion is that its place is taken over - it is substituted by aesthetics,
art and what has become a modern buzzword in the Western world - not
the least in academia: "Design". This operation of substitution has a
long and intricate history in the West's intellectual history, as intricate as
theology, culminating in philosophy with the super-intellectualization of
Immanuel Kant's three "Critiques", especially the third one, Critique
of Judgment. The
intricacies are, however, overwhelming as evidenced by e.g. Christopher Norris'
book What's Wrong with Postmodernism (esp. pp. 208-220, 266-279). Since Kant's philosophy is extremely
intricated, it is also insidious because, if the normal reader succeeds in
understanding it, he will be also endangered to be necessarily convinced, the
rescue being to, rather, begin to study the most famous critics of Kant. An
unfortunate alternative, face-to-face the inability to understand the problem,
is illustrated by a typical attempt to justify "design" by submerging
the terms in a patchwork of catchwords such as responsibility, accountability,
justness, goodness, fairness, rectitude, virtue, ingeniousness, creativity,
care or, (why not? generally,) ethics and aesthetics themselves. But:
symptomatically there is no mention of conscience.
The example of this submersion or trivializing is offered in a book with a
promising, compelling subtitle, The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World(2012), akin to an early manuscript I already had reviewed in 2001. In chapter 13 dedicated to
"The Guarantor-of-Design (g.o.d.)"
(pp. 201-212), the authors borrow this acronym GOD from Churchman's book The
Design of Inquiring Systems (p. 21ff.) where he uses it as
"guarantor of destiny" in order to introduce theological perspectives
beginning in questions of simplicity and truth, with reference to historical
thinkers such as Descartes and Spinoza. Instead of dwelling on such questions
that are expanded by Churchman in the later book The Systems Approach
and its Enemies with specific references (pp. 127, 179, 212, 214) to
the guarantor, religion and the New Testament such as Matthew and Paul, the
Design Way kidnaps the acronym by using it "aesthetically" as
guarantor of design. The whole is then submerged into a number of
rhetorically powerful, attractive statements, and attractive but unanswered
questions, while theology is explained away. At the same time the designer - prospective
reader of the book - is not supposed to be "inspired" (by God or any
"god") but is symptomatically flattered as a divine world-creator,
with the following statements and questions:
"Design is an act of world creation. As such it can be experienced both as
inspiring and intimidating. As a world creator, a designer can be overwhelmed
by questions such as: Do I have the right to cause such significant change in
the world? What is the right approach to take when making such changes? What kind
of changes are good, or just, and for whom? As a designer, am I fully
responsible and accountable for my designs and to whom? Can I be relieved of
responsibility in some way? If not, how can I prepare for this responsibility
and..."
Theology Without God:
Heidegger, Autopoiesis, Evolution
Explaining away religion has also other curious effects. Among them is the
probably unconsciously perceived need of a theology without God. This is what
can contribute to explain the later decades' increasing popularity of the
philosopher Martin Heidegger, not only in Europe but also in the Anglo-American
headquarters of logical positivism and pragmatism. The expression as quoted by
John Macquarrie in his book Heidegger and Christianity (p.6)
and coined by the former student of Heidegger Karl Löwith is that
Heidegger's philosophy "is in its very essence a theology without
God". This would explain Heidegger's enormous success in an academia that
senses the need of a theology that is neutrally irreligious and therefore not
ethically compelling. This is consistent with the wavering conception of ethics
in Heidegger, as I did consider in my article on Ethics in Technology. A similar attempt of
what has been called (in Wikipedia) a "desolate theology" analog to
theology without God is the so called autopoiesis , certain ad hoc interpretations of self-organization, and of evolution, which provoke while being immune to
"heroic" attempts to argumentation. Such attempts appear
regularly in academia and in literature, often divorced from historical and philosophical
context. A late example is Douglas Hofstadter's in Gödel, Escher, Bach, further elaborated in his book I Am a Strange Loop, published in 2007, and illustrated in a video You are a strange loop. A further example is
Marcelo Gleiser's video Meaning in a silent universe. I find that, if anything, they are documents of the atheistic desperate
need of, and attempt to find something that functions as a god despite of
negating it, while benefitting of the mysticism inherent in the history of
the Eternal Return even if it does not relate to it.
Evolution is an immense chapter of a theology without God, and is related to
the question of materialism or biologism, with a cosmology beginning with a
famous, for many hilarious, “Big Bang”, at any rate much more hilarious than any religious account. A late
example of the immense debate about evolution is offered by David
Gelernter's essay "Giving up Darwin" (more on it below) and its
attempted rebuttal by Jerry
A. Coyne. I will limit my consideration to an
illustrative example - a conversation or debate between the atheist writer,
lecturer and broadcaster Susan Blackmore and psychologist Jordan Peterson, as
expounded in the video of their meeting discussing "Do we need God to make sense of life?".
In this video Blackmore returns to the fact that she feels in life a
"gratitude" that is not directed to an entity but is
"free-floating". She also observes that parts of the USA which are
the poorest or, in general, the most dysfunctional societies also are the most
believing, while the most organized and with the best welfare like Scandinavian
countries do well being highly secularized. Peterson's response is summarized
in the expression that Western wellbeing is the resting result of
Judeo-Christian heritage and that we still "live on the corpses of our
ancestors". The superficiality of Blackmore's initial observation ignores,
however, basic psychological realities and principles of experimental method,
like difference between correlation and causation. It ignores, for instance,
that material wellbeing makes people think that they can dispense with God, and
the other way around, hardship and tragedy fosters hope and a return to
religion. All this is related to the essence of love and friendship, as also
implied by the Aristotelian Nicomachean ethics (Book 8) and classification of
difference between true friendship based on goodness, and friendship based on
reciprocal utility or pleasure.
Evolution in the form of a Universal Darwinism appears
also, masked by esoteric mathematics, in claims popularized in the magazine Popular Mechanics (December 16,
2021) regarding a “A new
theory suggests that the universe perpetuates itself by constantly adapting its
own physical laws over time”. Or “our universe could be evolving the laws of
physics all by itself”. The news is based on a not peer-reviewed paper with the
title The Autodidactic Universe, authored by seven authors (sic) on the site of arXiv, and
presenting “an approach to cosmology in which the Universe learns its own
physical laws”. My comment is that this insight does apply esoteric mathematics
that escapes the question of its foundations and legitimacy as suggested in my
essay on computers
as embodied mathematics. In doing so, the
approach can be seen as a defective Spinozism. It redefines God as being the Universe, an
unconscious defective reenactment of what has already been done in Pantheism along the philosophy
of e.g. Spinoza. His early version of logicism could by its beauty aesthetically seduce philosophers,
as today computers can seduce people to computerize
society, believing in
superhuman artificial intelligence.
Besides Heidegger, autopoiesis and evolution we could also include Art, especially
its reduction to “design”, among the means for a theology without God. Today
there are many people who feel that art and design have the capability to
elicit morality, mutual understanding and goodness. For some details, see below what is explained in
the last paragraph of Religion or Art as
Opium for the People.
Explaining away religion has also less perceived psychological effects in
personal relationships such as in marriage or (today) "partnership"
and, in a larger scale, in social relations increasingly characterized by
aggression and political polarization. In the Christian conception man and
woman are supposed to be united helping each other to divine God's intention
for their lives and fulfill His Commandments. In the absence of this task it
can happen that man or woman come to expect that the partner (at the social
scale, political leaders) will fulfill all their divine expectations summarized
in a "personal happiness". A supposedly faultless person will dismiss
the partner for not satisfying the own inflated ego or, in the rare case of
reciprocal kindness, for "incompatibility" of character or
personality, whatever those words mean. The results are divorce, serial
monogamy, polyamory or, in short, promiscuity redefining the meaning of love
and agape, possibly equated with horny arousal. Stable marriage commitment,
which stood at the basis of family and society, and the consequent individual
development of the two contrahents and their progeny, have been
explained away by redefining love as sexual instinct, sublimated or not. All
this while ignoring the reason for what at every instant happens in bedrooms
all over the world, and appears to mean much more than natural animal sexual
instinct or evolutionary reproduction.
Theology without God: Feministic Sweden
About 40 years ago I read once an account
of a governmental group from the former Soviet Union having visited Sweden in
order to investigate how that country had been so successful in its process of
secularization. This was despite of book on the story of The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet
Experiment in Secularization. This visit must have been caused, as expressed
in the presentation of the book:
Even
though the Soviet Union's attempt to secularize its society was quite
successful at crushing the institutional and ritual manifestations of religion,
its leaders were surprised at the persistence of religious belief.
At least a part of the Swedish success may
be indirectly and unintendedly explained in a Swedish doctoral dissertation by
Hedda Janson published in 2023 with the title The Buddha
of the Sunbath: Buddhism and Theosophy in Ellen Key's Life Faith. Ellen Key (1849-1926) is regarded as a main historical
figure in the development of Swedish feminism, despite of being generally
distrusted today, being classed as a “difference feminist” that I would qualify
further as essentialist-difference feminist according to the
mind-blowing discussions in feminism, which I consider in a separate text on Reason and Gender. In it I also show how
so-called sexual derangements that go in parallel with feminism end up in
theological questions.
In
our context here what is important is to realize how the doctoral dissertation
on Ellen Key, both in its structure, story, and its final message, eschews the
question of truth, turning itself into a partial account of influences on Key’s
thought and her intellectual contacts, contributing to how and why Sweden
(after, formally, China as earlier the Soviet Union) came to be (considered as)
a most secularized country of the world.
As my thoughts go after
reading the dissertation, the Swedish process of secularization was successful
because it connected the whole issue of the liberation of women to the concept
of democracy, women’s suffrage, and thereby to the development of western
feminism that was further enhanced by their entrance into the work force during
and especially after the second world war. This was in turn coupled to the
earlier motherly care of children being gradually taken over by nurseries,
publicly financed daycare and schools. It was further connected to the rise of
modern rationalism of science and industry as being compatible with the
powerful heritage of post-romanticism, the philosophy of Nietzsche, father of Heidegger’s theology without God, and without Christianity,
as well as with “Eastern thought” of Buddhism, and Goethe’s and Tolstoy’s (seasoned with Spinoza’s heritage)
philosophical-literary criticism of Christianity. All this is combined with the
mirage of an alternative “Eastern” spirituality represented by a vaguely
apprehended vague Buddhism not connected to Hinduism, further combined with Theosophy. It may be enough to plunge and drown the Key’s whole intellectual
edifice into the morass of SBNR – spiritual but not religious. One should wonder how these European thoughts and
assumedly high cultural development may have been related to the circumstances
that allowed for two world wars and to the Holocaust. This vaguely apprehended
Buddhism in the intellectual milieu of Ellen Key neglected and still neglects
the psychology of the modern westerner. The doctoral dissertation in the track
of Key’s own development neglects, for instance, the whole criticism of use and
misuses of Eastern thought as found, for instance, in the psycho-social
analysis by Carl Jung’s Collected Works (CW). As found in CW9 and CW11, the vol. 9, part II (§ 273), and in vol. 11
(§ 773):
The historical development of our Western mentality
cannot be compared in any way with the Indian. Anyone who believes that he can
simply take over Eastern forms of thought is uprooting himself, for they do not
express our Western past, but remain bloodless intellectual concepts that
strike no chord in our inmost being. We are rooted in Christian soil. This
foundation does not go very deep, and, as we have seen it has proved alarmingly
thin in places, so that original paganism, in altered guise, was able to regain
possession of a large part of Europe and impose on it its characteristic
economic pattern of slavery.
The Eastern attitude violates the specifically
Christian values, and it is no good blinking this fact. If our new attitude is
to be genuine, i.e. grounded in our own history, it must be acquired with full
consciousness of the Christian values and of the conflict between them and the
introverted attitude of the East. We must get at the Eastern values from within
and not from without, seeking them in ourselves, in the unconscious.
Let me quote from the above
quotation: “[…]Eastern forms of thought […] that strike no chord in our
innermost being”: we should add “Except for the allure of easy feel-good by allowing a flight from the
duties in Christianity”. And how are these
questions handled or ignored in Janson’s dissertation, despite of a unique
valuable historical and encyclopedic survey of authors that may appear as an
extensive and erudite “name dropping”? A key statement for me is (page 18, my
emphasis with italics.):
In the work, we will therefore see how Buddhism and
Theosophy were presented to the intellectual elite in Sweden at this time,
which sources Key read, and how she interpreted them. However, it is not within the scope of this thesis to examine the
extent to which Key's conclusions were "correct", i.e. how they
related to what Buddhism or Theosophy "really" was.
The statement means that Janson’s
dissertation does not address the truth or correctness of Key’s conclusions but
only whether they were correct in the sense of being in concordance with
(Janson’s understanding of) Key’s understanding of Buddhism and Theosophy
according to historical documents and personal contact that were available to
her. The quotation marks must then mean that such “correctness” would else be
their correctness or truth without quotation marks, or their true relatedness
of what Buddhism and Theosophy (again in quotation marks:) “really” (truly,
correctly?) were, or are. I understand this as a consequence of that many
historians in the western mainly skeptical relativist and secular culture mean,
or are meant, to only tell what people have truly said or (perhaps) done,
without taking stand on whether what was said and done and their judging is or
was ethically truly good or bad. In terms of philosophy of science this is a
result of not being able to define correctness or fake
(dis)information, e.g. in terms of accuracy and
precision. In my own contacts with the (Swedish)
discipline of History of Ideas I have joked by claiming that it appears
to state that “some people thought, did and concluded something, while others
thought, did and concluded otherwise”. This belongs, of course, to the question
of relativism. Relativism in our case, however, is hidden
behind an enumeration of historical criticisms of Key’s positions by Swedish
(e.g. Norström and Wirsén) and foreign intellectuals (I did not note references with comments
about them), whose evaluation is then symptomatically, relativistically ignored
(cf. below). In fact, the controversial and problematic but academically
influential Michel
Foucault considered that “Truth is not the purpose
of history, but the discourse
contained in history”. In our case: the dissertation in question is then a discourse, and the problem seems to be
the same as in the classic work of Alain Besançon: The Falsification of the Good. This
backfires on Key herself when Janson observes that the very same Key criticized
other (non - “essential-difference”?) feminists by asking a basic question that
originally made me admire her for advancing an ethical and intellectually-based
feminism. Cf. Key’s Missbrukad kvinnokraft
[Abused womanly labour, printed together with Kvinnopsykologi och
kvinnlig logik, here, and searchable here], page 25f.):
It is therefore I am not against women's work. But what I want to say
that it is the great of women's emancipation’s mistake to place the main
emphasis on the woman's work, not in her field of work. A work’s ability to
develop and make happy is related to its conformity with the nature of the
worker, and so does the efficiency of the work. Therefore, man has reason to
deplore the recklessness with which he women seek to enter areas, where they
have no use for their female temperament, where they therefore produce mediocre
values, to no joy for themselves and little benefit to society. I regret the
women who cannot choose, who are forced by the bread shortage to take the
first, best job that offers itself, disregarding how much this goes against
their innermost desires. But I accuse the women, who can calmly choose their
life calling and who, however, do not give a thought to choose so that the
feminine in their nature will put in use at work. To direct woman to natural
working areas, this should be the foremost interest for the women's cause
interest, instead of its spokeswomen now uncritically welcoming the woman at
manly work area. […]
Nature corrects the abuse of freedom, but
it corrects slowly and seriously. And women could avoid more than a painful
rebuke, if they began to realize that what existence really needs is not their
work in the fields where they produce the same or lesser values than the men,
but in the fields where they produce greater values.
Unfortunately, I did not see the dissertation returning to, testing and
validating such a statement that, by the way, despite of many historical
references to philosophers contains many unstated philosophical assumptions and
wishful thinking about what and how
“nature” corrects vs. what “existence” really needs (Herbert Spencer’s “evolutionism”?), vs. human
self-determination. It is the more unfortunate when considering that women
did not only “enter the workforce” but, rather, everywhere beyond home,
depending upon the definition of work. Key also prophetically feared that,
politically, feminists of all kinds would ultimately subvert basic societal
ethics and tend to become like men. This whole critical view of dangers and
misunderstandings of feminism, which are recognizable in its transformation up
to today, is stated in Key’s ignored Kvinnopsykologi and Kvinnlig Logik [Women's Psychology and Women's Logic] (esp. its pp. 121 ff.) which is only mentioned
on the dissertation’s pages 123 but especially 238 and 299. Together with its
symptomatic twin-essay Missbrukad
kvinnokraft [Abused womanly labour] mentioned several times in the
dissertation, it has been ignored (by feminists) in Sweden to the point that
when I wanted to borrow, among others, these last-mentioned books from the
Stockholm City Library at the end of the feministic times in the 1970ies I was
informed that I had to wait for them being retrieved the from long-term stock
where rarely borrowed books were placed.
Besides these missed aspects of Ellen Key, towards the end of her text
(p. 285) Janson chooses to emphasize Key’s commonalities with the theosophist Annie
Besant
We can state that both Key and Besant were
strongly critical of Christianity, and used their new teachings to demonstrate
Christianity's harmful impact on society and people. Both included the sharp
criticism in the discussion of life and death, but at the same time offered an
alternative worldview that gave the opportunity to create ethical justification
and a kind of hopefulness even in a "post-Christian" existence. A
number of critics, as we have seen above, argued that these new insights were
actually materialism in disguise, and that man's ethical guidance and existence
would collapse without the divine (and Christian) dimension. That something
other than the Christian model of explanation could provide such strong
motivation was not even conceivable. Both Key and Besant were also keen to
highlight the consistency of their respective philosophies with the modern
sciences.
With regard to the adopted relativism: not “to demonstrate”
Christianity’s harmful effects…” but rather “to claim”? One possible explicit
conclusion of the dissertation could or should then be that Ellen Key message
is, or has worked as if it were, materialism in disguise and that its success
may be attributed to its consistency with atheistic philosophies in concert
with the prestige of the modern (materialistic) sciences supporting industry.
This suggests the often used and implicitly defined term “Ethical
Atheism”. The dissertation’s last pages forget
the criticism that had been directed to Key, as well the one formulated by Key
herself including in displaying abuses of feminism in Missbrukad kvinnokraft and Kvinnopsykologi
and Kvinnlig Logik. The last pages of the dissertation (e.g. p. 305, below)
suggest to the reader a relativistic apologetics if not apotheosis of the whole
prior text disregarding all prior references to the historical critics. It is
an apologetical apotheosis that in the spirit of Statist Individualism may have inspired the declaration of the
Swedish government (in 2014, retracted
after the elections in 2022) declaring itself “feministic”. All this
while, paradoxically, the latest
Swedish feminism symptomatically even “canceled” the name of its by now too “conservative-dissident” pioneer Ellen Key.
Now to the dissertation’s p. 305:
Furthermore, the social consequences of religion would
become part of a feminist struggle with spiritual signs, where reductionism,
industrialism, materialism, secularization and what was perceived as the
simplification of the view of man and the world, were seen as a product of a
masculine and patriarchal rule. The solution was, for some of the feminists,
female influence in all areas, and Key was one of the first to highlight women
as suitable to become priests (though more questionably, as we saw, as
religious founders). The inclusion of the feminine aspect in the world
required, according to Key, a monistic view of life, and her fight against
patriarchy was waged on two fronts: on the one hand against the new simplistic
materialistic worldview, but also against the equally, in her opinion,
stultifying dualistic Christianity, which reduced man to a passive object in
the hands of a condemning God (her impression from revival Christianity lived
on for a long time). Her solution became an embodied religion in its most
literal form.
It is necessary to note that this kind of resume of Key’s thought would
not pass unnoticed if its relativistic tone were applied to a historical
overview to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Or to
a book or a Wikipedia article on deniers of The Holocaust, or
not even on articles (like mine?) by
dissidents about ongoing politics to avoid climate warming. As it would not be seen with gentle eyes if it were applied to an
article (like mine)
depicting some legitimate motives for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or motives
for McCarthyism. It
is interesting to note the process of German secularization, certainly related
to the Holocaust, in which the philosopher (and philosopher of religion) Johann
Gottlob
Fichte (1762-1814) with his provisory contact with Immanuel
Kant (cf. my
article on the interpretation of his religious position) is said to have been forced to resign from
his position at Jena’s university under the accuse of atheism. Regarding the
German process of secularization as related to the Holocaust it is intriguing
to read what Bibi Jonsson
wrote in a paper
(outlined here)
that was published in 2009. She points out that Ellen Key expresses a racial
hygiene program in her study The Century
of the Child (1900), which is followed up by a couple of Swedish Nazi
intellectual women. Symptomatically, the same thinking appears in the social
democrats Alva and Gunnar Myrdal's well-known population
study from 1934. It not only propagates an increase in childbearing
and in children’s early participation in approved programs at public nursery schools,
but also for "the radical sorting out of highly unfit individuals, which
can be achieved through sterilization". These thoughts were a basis for
some accusations that Key was Nazi while, of course, since Nazism was not yet
established, the problem is that she rested intellectually on the same
intellectual shaky basis upon which Nazi ideology was later developed. It is
paradoxical that such insights are used in our times by the political left (in
Swedish, in the magazine Expo, 2003, 4) to raise suspicions that Key’s
thought supports the rise of conservative political right, enemy of modern
mainstream (and radical?) feminism. That is, one more tragic example of what I
called above the reduction of religion to politics.
It is then appropriate to conclude with some quotation
from Carl Jung, international authority in the psycho-sociology of Eastern
thought, that was ignored in the dissertation but has written about originally
basically Protestant cultures (CW11, §772f, and §861ff):
In
the same way Western man is Christian, no matter to what denomination his
Christianity belongs. […] If you shift the formula a bit and substitute for God
some other power, for instance the world or money, you get a complete picture
of Western man – assiduous, fearful, devout, self-abasing, enterprising, greedy, and violent in his pursuit of the goods of
this world: possessions, health, knowledge, technical mastery, public welfare,
political power, conquest, and so on. The mind is chiefly employed in devising
suitable “isms” to hide the real motives or to get more loot. […] Instead of
learning the spiritual techniques of the East by heart and imitating them in a
thoroughly Christian way – imitatio Christi! – with a corresponding
forced attitude, it would be far more to the point to find out whether there
exists in the unconscious an introverted tendency similar to that which become
the guiding spiritual principle of the East. We would then be in position to
build our own grounds with our own methods. It we snatch these things from the
East, we have merely indulged our Western acquisitiveness, confirming yet again
that “everything good is outside”, whence it has to be fetched and pumped into our
barren souls.
The
period of world discovery in the geographical and scientific sense had begun,
and to an ever increasing degree thought emancipated itself from the shackles
of religious tradition. […] While the Church of Rome, thanks to her unsurpassed
organization, remained a unity, Protestantism split into nearly four hundred
denominations. This is a proof on the one hand of its bankruptcy, and, on the
other, of a religious vitality which refuses to be stifled. […] By directing
its main attack against the authority of the Roman Church, Protestantism
largely destroyed belief in the Church as the indispensable agent of divine
salvation Thus the burden of authority fell to the individual [that
consequently relies on the “Hegelian State” that in our case declares itself as
“feminist” and takes care of children’s education in nurseries. My note], and with it a religious
responsibility that had never existed before. […] With the collapse of the
rite, which did the work for him, he had to do without God’s answer to his
plans. This dissatisfaction explains the demand for systems that promise an
answer – the visible or at least noticeable favour of another (higher,
spiritual, or divine) power. […] But inside the religious movement there were
any number, of attempts to combine science with religious belief and practice,
as for instance Christian Science, theosophy, and anthroposophy. The last-named, especially, likes to give itself scientific airs and
has, therefore, like Christian Science, penetrated into intellectual circles.
Let me parenthetically remark that my after having written and published
in the Internet the rest of my text in this section, on May 14, 2023 the
Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter had
an interview with the archbishop emerita Antje Jackelén, the first female archbishop, who served as archbishop of the Church of Sweden from June 2014 to October 2022. The
interview reports her stating here below, qualified by a second
equivocal quotation that follows, which raises doubts on whether she has
understood the extent of Christianity’s crisis in Sweden (my translation):
But the Swedes' education when it comes to
theology and religion is also very low. I believe that the ignorance of one's
own milieu causes people to look for spirituality elsewhere, in Buddhism or the
new age movement, in the delusion that these religions or lifestyle
philosophies lack dogmas and are more undemanding.
Christianity's success is its apparent
failure - modern, secular culture has absorbed Christianity to such an extent
that it is not always so easily recognizable.
Today, besides the earlier mentioned Christian Science one could have
mentioned the “new religious movement” Falun Gong, and raised difficult but meaningful
comparisons. The late reference to
anthroposophy raises also the question ignored in the dissertation of why it
did historically arise out of theosophy or theosophy’s shortcomings, and
whether and why Key did not refer to it and its differences from theosophy and
the reason for her continued emphasis on theosophy. I guess that Key kept her
allegiance to theosophy because of her programmatic distancing from
Christianity, and consequently from anthroposophy’s great emphasis and its
secular interpretation
of the mission of Christ. And she kept her allegiance this despite
of the Theosophy’s sensational and for many theosophists “scandalous”
designation of Jiddu
Krishnamurti as an incarnation as Maitreya or kind of successor of Jesus Christ.
- I wish to terminate by
declaring that I am aware of literature that is critical of Jung, a matter that
I mention in my presentation of an essay on Conscience and Truth. A better understanding of analytical
psychology can be obtained from its applications in other fields as suggested
by Theodor Abt in Progress without Loss of Soul: Toward a Wholistic
Approach to Modernization and Planning.
The explaining away of religion and its reduction to politics of power games is
consistent with what has been called "Ego inflation", which in
popular language is associated with sheer braggart egoism, "Me is number
one" and "either I know or I know who knows", ignoring the
immense problem of our necessary dependence upon the knowledge of other
contemporaries and dead (Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth.)
Billions of other humans are then supposed to be just stupid or simply
prejudiced, also because they have not frequented some years' of
"higher" education, like engineers who learn to utilize logically
related formulas conceived by others. As a matter of fact many of
them can be seen as intellectual scavengers who feast and profit upon the
conquest of forefathers who conquered pure theoretical knowledge by taking
stand in theological wars. And profit is one main driving force of technology
today, motivating scientists and intellectuals as e.g. Roland
Paulsen in his studies on "empty
labour" and anxiety, and Christer Sanne in his dissertation Arbetets Tid [Working
hours in the age of work, ISBN 91 7798 949 X, English summary pp. 275-283]. It
means to discover that the claimed time savings thanks to technology are often
an illusion because they are matched, among others, by greed (a "mortal
sin") disguised in politics and changing
conceptions of the relation between needs and demand. They lead the authors to
studies of ethics of work and sustainability.
What should be - but is not - evident is that often "I do not know that I
do not know", i.e. that I do not know my own limitations. This may
ultimately and paradoxically lead to inflationary faith in science as a
substitute for God, with a scientism that under the guide of unconscious
contents ends paradoxically in pseudoscience. The latter is then attempted to
be countered by organizations like Skeptical Science. By negating and ignoring structure and possible functions of insanity
caused by hidden effective and therefore legitimate psychological influences it
opens the door to further absurd irruptions of unconscious content into the
intellect. This becomes quackery if not outright addiction to one of the
greatest quackeries that is gambling or unconscious defiance of chance that
others, confidently and apparently in a naive mood, prefer to call God's will,
where God has been immensely more discussed than chance. See, however, Kristiina Savin's Swedish dissertation Fortuna's klädnader, (Sekel, 2011, ISBN 978-91-85767-84-7),
[Fortuna's guises: Fortune, misfortune, and risk in early modern Sweden], with
an abstract and summary in English, p. 383-388, where it is mentioned, p.
375, that God's will has been substituted by Force
Majeure. The book is presented as "The
author maps the sources' varying interpretations of events at the intersection
of religion and profane learning, linguistic conventions and lived experience,
intellectual insights and emotional reactions. In the myriad of historical
events and strange human fate, she demonstrates an overall pattern that makes
visible the mental habits, outlook and worldview of the early modern learned
culture". This recalls the present shortcomings of probability theory (the
book's p. 12) and what analytical psychology, including its puzzling concept
of synchronicity, tries
to unravel.
About related scientific-statistical misunderstandings of the concept of
probability, se C.W. Churchman, Prediction and Optimal Decision.(especially chap. 6 on objective probability, pp.137-173).
I guess that ego inflation can also go along with extreme gifted analytical-logical
ability that is not sufficiently balanced by feeling and intuition for becoming
then a grace of rational faith. If not balanced, such sheer ability lures
people into paranoia of political conspiracy
theories or sheer fanatism of
theological disputes. If people's illegitimate oversized ego is finally
overpowered by the ignored unconscious dimensions of the psyche they begin to
identify themselves with political world saviours who unravel
intrigues of conspiracies, or in the best case identify themselves with saints,
or Biblical figures, or as a dissenting pope.
Religion or Art as
Opium for the People
In politics a psychoanalyst could recognize similar psycho-social mechanisms
mentioned above in the paradox of the famous quote from Karl Marx that religion
is "the opium for the people". In
the meantime he was passing over to the people what many regard as
the quackery of Marxism itself, a sort of countertransference between Marx and the personified
"people". Quackery, as also follows from cursory reading Jung's
work and its detractors, is then the result of unconscious repression of
important dimensions of thought that are not allowed in a narrow doctrinaire
materialistic science, in scientism. This is what also allows the reading
of Marx to turn into "perverted Christianity", which claims to redeem
the oppressed weak and poor of the world, turning into the socialism and
communism of Stalin and Mao Zedong, as well as into the controversial goodness
of unrestricted welcoming
of economic migrants.
Quackery may result from a misunderstood too facile scientism and concomitant
"skepticism" by the establishment, as shown by Pascal in his Pensées,
and as noted in the particular edition of the book introduced by
Émile Faguet, (p. vii). Faguet comments there that Pascal relies
on skepticism in order to demonstrate the necessity of
faith. Faguet also cites the non-orthodox philosopher and historian
Ernest Renan: that religion has no proof other than skepticism
itself, which makes also agnosticism invalid; religion
proves the necessity of faith by means of the impossibility of believing in
nothing. One could add: "in nothing except in a paradoxically and
supposedly godly and undefined human Reason", to be written
with capital R, a reason that Pascal explores, and which requires what
Churchman (in The Design of Inquiring Systems) calls a
"guarantor".
This reminds of G.K. Chesterton's famous and hardly understood quotation
mentioned earlier: "A
man who won’t believe in God will believe in anything." This is apparent in the visionary predictions by the popular
theoretical physicist, futurist, and popular science
communicator Michio Kaku, as well as by the apparent polymath Max Tegmark who
(in Wikipedia, accessed 3 August 2018) formulates the "Ultimate ensemble
theory of everything" or the "mathematical universe
hypothesis" that may be seen as a naive version of (a
computer-oriented) mathesis universalis including phantasies on the future of artificial intelligence
and technological singularity. They are phantasies
that are fantastically and schizophrenically summarized in the
quagmire of a bankrupt of analytical philosophy, caused by a misunderstanding of logic and mathematics in
the context of scientific methodology, as in a book on Superintelligence.
Chesterton’s quotation can also be applied to
understanding that even if religion is not opium for the people, art,
aesthetics and the associated concept of “culture” can work as opium. In
particular, aesthetics and its reduction in design, can work as a
substitute for religion. In order to not overwork the present text I limit
myself to refer the reader to a particular essay on the matter, in the
apparently farfetched context of the ongoing computerization of society.
"Myths" of
Artificial Intelligence
The explaining away of religion and Chesterton's "believing in anything"
also opens the way for believing in the future interaction with other planetary
worlds in outer space, and in artificial intelligence, AI, computers with
self-consciousness, whatever it is, will overpower the human mind, or that
AI-robots should have human rights, or that we will ultimately create
the superintelligent robotical paradise on Earth, or whatever
wherever. Or believing in discussions about, say - machine consciousness and machine ethics ending in so called technological singularity. All this without the
possibility of "debating" the matter because of myriads of
misunderstandings arising in part from faulty difficult definitions and presuppositions,
to begin with about the meaning of intelligence.
This phenomenon of misunderstandings and phantasies about AI is
revealed and, in a sense also "solved" in all its
complexity by what I regard as a fundamental work by West Churchman by the time
we elders met the first wave of hype-enthusiasm about AI in the seventies. It
was The Design of Inquiring Systems: Basic Concepts of Systems and
Organization that I myself tried to expand and facilitate the reading
of, by means of a Word and Issue Index, followed by a sort of contextual evaluation in The Systems Approach to Design and Inquiring Information Systems.
I think that with this kind of understanding it is not, anymore, a
question of whether AI in its many forms will be applied in modern society. It
is rather a question of forecasting the consequences and the possibilities of
counteracting the dangerous ones, becoming a problem that I considered in
my Trends in Philosophy of Technology,
and ultimately a theological problem that motivates the present text. The difficulties
will be enormous, not only because the academic devaluation of theology, and
even philosophy in technical and political context. Even when a professor of
computer science warns about overconfidence in AI in Swedish mass media (Dagens
Nyheter, October 7th 2018), he relies upon exhortations for the need
to be conscious about the system's limitations.
The warnings are based upon appeals to understand and to
be conscious that we are still far from creating (an
undefined) intelligence at a human level with
the ability to feel and reason, evaluate, make moral
evaluations and explain what it is doing and planning
to do. All italicized concepts remain undefined, presupposing political,
philosophical and theological competence, understanding why we are "still" far
from "creating" artificial life and paradise on earth, understanding
the why of not to "believe in anything".
Even a most sophisticated Italian mathematician, Paolo Zellini, who
dedicated much of his life writing about the philosophy of mathematics
including computer science, concludes his work with a rather inconsequential
book, so far only in Italian language, that vaguely warns about the Dictatorship of calculus. His barely outspoken warnings are supported by reference to the
extremely explicit ones by the more popular sort of polymath Jaron
Lanier. Lanier's limitations appear most
clearly when he introduces also provocative thoughts on virtual-reality that
challenge earlier elaborate condemnation by
others as being deleterious gnosticism in
computer science. Despite positive ambitious reviews, Zellini's neglect of theology,
particularly of Christianity, leads him to miss the most relevant historical
aspects of the contribution by Jan Brouwer to the understanding of the problems
considered here.
It is symptomatic that when we humans no longer believe in God, we
happen to believe that we (Nietzschean superhumans) are so godlike as to be
able to create machines in the track of Artificial General Intelligence
and ChatGPT that will transcend human intelligence and be substitutes
for God.
Religion and theological reasoning, as I already treated in the essay on "debate", is also evaded by
just going around and asking too easy questions requiring too difficult answers
on whether people "believe" in the "existence" of
"God". I witnessed an extreme example of this in a radio
program where several adults entertained themselves and uncritical listeners by
asking a number of children such questions, stopping short only from also
asking who or what God is, which would require millenary critical review of the
Bible. In doing this they avoided to understand and define what it means to
believe, as related for instance to have faith, or to define what is the
meaning of existence. Not to mention the meaning or definition of definition (R.L. Ackoff, Scientific Method, pp.141-176), which is not for us to discuss in its contrast to amplification. In short, they avoided to modestly
acknowledge their own ignorance or to courageously stand for their knowledge or
belief. And they did so at the cost of transferring responsibility to
embarrassed cute children. The famous German philosopher and university
professor Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1815), for instance, defended himself
from the serious official accusation
of atheism in an elaborate text, Fichte, Querelle de l'Athéisme [The Atheism Dispute, French translation, pp. 199-213]. Among other
things he discusses whether a non-material entity could be said to
"exist" as it is properly said of material bodies,
but ultimately he lost his position at the university. I would extend
the problem to include the problem of the meaning of "to know" (who
and how knows whether we know?), and about the "existence" of
"heaven" and "hell". Regarding the meaning of "to
know" or "intelligence", the whole book by West Churchman
- The Design of Inquiring Systems, shows the often ignored complexity of the scientific and
philosophical issue. And such issues are, furthermore, illustrated
scientifically by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli's work in
"loop quantum gravity" (and relational interpretation of
quantum mechanics), as expounded in his popular book The Order of Time (chap. 3,7,8)
where he explains the difficulties of the concept of "existence" in
the context of time and space. What he does not yet suspect are the
implications of defective application of overvalued mathematics and logic to
modern, "front line extreme physics", as suggested by and considered
in the conclusions of my previously mentioned article on the subject.
Similarly Carl Jung is known for his famous statement in an interview in BBC
"I don't need to believe, I know"
upon a question on whether he believed in God. It could have been seen as a
revival of the theological question of Credo ut intelligam. The
subsequent discussions were considered further by Jung himself, in his
published Letters, (Vol. II, Ed. Gerhard Adler, 1975, 1953,
letter to Valentine Brooke, pp. 520-523). In his Collected Works (CW
11, p. 44, §79) Jung tries to explain in (too) simple terms this complex
matter: "I believe only what I know. Everything else is
hypothesis and beyond that I can leave a lot of things to the Unknown. They do
not bother me. But they would begin to bother me, I am sure, if I felt that
I ought to know about them." Similar approaches to this
issues were presented in my essay Belief
and Reason (pdf, 1993, Internet Archive here). Peter Kreeft, a critic of Immanuel Kant's philosophy seen as one
of "the pillars of unbelief", expresses himself in the following terse way:
"If I were God, I would favor an honest atheist over a dishonest theist,
and Kant is to my mind a dishonest theist, because there is only one honest
reason for believing anything: because it is true."
Jordan Peterson, whom I referred to in the earlier question of identity
politics, revives this question in one
of several videos about whether he
believes in God, and particularly one with the challenging title Who
dares to say he believes in God?. Besides all this, from the coarser point of view of Pragmatism represented
by William James who also wrote about faith and truth, most of us agree that sheer belief or faith in God can influence
humans' acting in life. Faith in God has effects, it is "effective",
as religion is effective as consolation and encouragement in times of
affliction. Effectiveness can be seen as a proof. It is "as if" God
exists (but compare with the as-if dilemma in Kantian philosophy),
whatever existence means when people cannot or do not want to dwell on
philosophy, psychology and theology. Even those deterministic materialists who
do not believe in free will, and boast that they can prove it by means of
deterministic physics, concede that the penal code must be designed "as
if" is truly free in order for the code to have effect, be effective. The
question arises of why, then, claim that it is "not true" or that it
is not free, without plunging into a millenary philosophical quest of what is
truth and freedom, if one cannot motivate the rejection of the pragmatist philosophy of "As if".
Regarding the claim that something is "not true" one can also wonder why
people appreciate fiction books and theater plays that convey true messages
about the truths of life or of the human psyche. And not only that: they can
repeatedly read or go to the theater to see and listen, appreciating and trying
to digest the dramas despite of already knowing them, despite of knowing that
they are "only fiction" or "myth", as many claim that the story of Jesus Christ is. I know of only
a few to have dared to elaborate this question in relation to Christian
theology. Franz
von Baader is one who dared, as expounded by J.
Glenn Friesen in a paper on Baader's typically convolute essay
(1833) Concerning the conflict of religious faith and knowledge as the
spiritual root of the decline of religious and political society in our time
and every time" (sic!) [Über den Zwiespalt des
Religiösen Glaubens under Wissens als die geistige Wurzel des Verfalls der
religiösen und politischen Societät in unserer wie in jeder Zeit]. I refer to
the link above because this is not the place for extending this issue. For more
details, please see especially the paragraph (and the following one) starting
with:
"We have asserted an almost universally present lack of clarity about the
relation of faith to knowledge among philosophers and theologians. If this
assertion is doubted, then one need only consider that these philosophers and
theologians have certainly been able to say a lot to us about the relation of
believing to knowing, but less of the relation of believing to willing
[...]."
And just as one cannot move freely without touching the ground, and cannot touch
the ground without free movement, so one cannot use reason [Vernunft]
without being free to believe, and cannot believe without making use of his
reason. From this follows that everywhere that faith and knowledge [Wissen]
appear to conflict with or to retard each other, it is really only one belief
that is fighting with another belief if a person has already used, and has had
to use his knowing ('raison') as a weapon to defend or to attack this
other belief.
And this is illustrated by the case, as I remember and interpreted it, of an
atheistic engineer I met, who had concluded that there is no free will. I
recommended him to read the above mentioned essay because of its
possible relevance despite of knowing that he had refused to debate whenever he
did not have the same background knowledge as his counterpart. He answered only
that he did not judge the essay relevant because (1) He is materialist and
therefore he does not believe in God - or the other way round. (2) For a
materialist free will is, in its basic meaning, logically impossible.
Disregarding my intuition that the first item was a naive tautology, and
disregarding my own conclusions on the futility
of debates on such complexities, I answered that I
think that he simply only believes in both materialism and
logic (the power of matter and of logic). This recalls to my mind a curious
quotation found in Eric J. Leed's The Mind of the Traveler (p.
107): "[...] they that have seen little believe not much, whereas they
that have seen much believe the more".
Religion and Virtual Reality
- VR
I consider two texts about book A (A1 and
A2) and one about a paper (B) concerning virtual reality, VR-research. I do this in order to show how they problematize the
question of what is real vs. virtual,
viewed by me against the background of claims that religion does not deal with
realities. People including those who define themselves as atheists can be fond
of, and willing to read thick books of fiction including serious novels such as
by Dostoevsky, or to go repeatedly to see one same theater play. And now there
are those who indulge in writing or reading books like The psychological reality of digital travel. And
there are researchers in modern quantum physics (cf. references to Rovelli in
this paper and my
related paper) who question the meaning of matter,
space, time, and existence, while atheists keep questioning the “existence” of
God or gods.
Within the frame of the present paper I
wish to illustrate some intellectual somersaults that allow a sort of canceling
of reality permitting “virtual reality” while forbidding both virtual reality
and reality of God. I will restrain my overview to abstracts of the two
following texts, which are preceded by their respective Internet-links. Each
one of my questions that follow each one of the two texts (A) respectively (B)
refer to points in the texts that are numbered (1, 2, 3,…) and are intended to
be self-explanatory, in the spirit of item #210 of The art of worldly wisdom that
I treat in my essay on Information
and debate. Nevertheless, having
received from one of the authors answers to my questions of the B-text, I
complete each one of those answers with one my further question or comment.
(A1) Brian Martin: excerpts from the review of Donald Hoffman's The
case against reality:
ABSTRACT: Imagine
looking at a computer desktop. You see various icons that you can modify, move
around, stick into folders and delete. The desktop is a (1) type of reality.
(2) If you wanted, you could formulate an ontology and epistemology, or laws
explaining the (3) behaviour of icons, images and the like. But the icons are
not what is (4) really happening in your computer. For that, you need to enter
a (5) different world, composed on microcircuits and tiny movements of
electrons. In contrast to
microelectronics, the desktop is a convenient way of interacting with your
computer. Trying to understand the underlying reality would slow you down
dramatically. So you start treating the desktop as (6) reality,
yet it’s only an interface.
Now imagine that every object that you see—an apple, a phone, your hand—is
analogous to an icon on a computer desktop. You see something that makes it
possible to (7) operate effectively, but you don’t see
reality.
… [Donald Hoffman] presents a
comprehensive argument that we don’t see or otherwise sense (6) reality,
but only an interface with reality. He calls this perspective the Interface
Theory of Perception—ITP. Throughout his book, he uses the computer desktop
metaphor.
In support of his perspective, he cites a theorem called Fitness Beats
Truth—FBT. Using evolutionary game theory, it’s possible to show that a
perceptual system designed to recognise what is useful to survival will nearly
always beat a perceptual system that sees the truth. Hoffman’s argument is
that, as the result of evolution, our entire perceptual apparatus, namely the
way that our minds interpret sensory inputs, is designed (8) for
fitness, not to reveal the truth.
Scientists in various fields have developed models of the world that differ
considerably from everyday perception. (9) Physicists tell us that objects are
made up of atoms, which are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons, and
which in turn are made up of other more fundamental particles. This means that
a chair is actually mostly empty space; it only appears solid. Physicists also
tell us that light is an oscillating electrical and magnetic field, or
alternatively particles called photons, and that the light we can see is only a
tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. From a physicist’s perspective,
we don’t see all of reality; special instruments are needed to access much of
what is invisible to us. In this context, ITP may not seem so strange.
The driver [sic] behind Hoffman’s concerns is the (10) problem of
consciousness. He canvasses the standard views and finds them wanting. For
example, he says that no standard perspective begins to provide the mechanisms
in the brain that create the conscious experience of the colour red. Rather
than pursue the usual approaches, Hoffman says that to figure out the
relationship between consciousness and the brain, there is a fundamental assumption
that needs to be jettisoned: the assumption that we see reality the way it
really is.
Beauty and Survival: Hoffman presents Interface Theory of Perception (ITP)
via a series of themes involving (11) perception, including beauty, illusions
and polychromy. Consider beauty: how can a person’s judgement of what is
attractive be related to activity in their brain? Scientists, Hoffman says, are
making progress in understanding the neural mechanisms behind assessments of
beauty, but not on the conscious experience of beauty…
Hoffman describes the standard view that
perceptions of beauty are the result of a perceptual system that evolved for
survival…
Hoffman spends considerable time describing
various philosophical positions and positioning his perspective among them. He
(11) acknowledges predecessors with similar views, such as Immanuel Kant…
Hoffman supports a
monist philosophical position that he calls “conscious realism.” In it, the
world is populated by (10) conscious agents that influence each other and
perceive each other…
The purpose of conscious realism is…explaining consciousness…[and] posits
consciousness as the foundation of explanation of our world.
[You can read the whole text of the review that continues with the reviewer's
own speculations at the link already given above].
QUESTIONS:
1. "a type of reality"? Many
types? Or only two, physical and virtual?
2. "if you wanted"? And if you
could? "Ontology and epistemology, or laws"? Ontology or different
ontologies etc. for many realities?
3. "icons"? Relation to signs vs. symbols? "Behaviour"
of signs and symbols?
4. "explaining the behaviour"
of signs and symbols? Or the behavior of the human user of signs and symbols? Explaining vs. understanding?
5. "a different world"? What is
a world? How many different worlds are there?
6. "not what is really
happening"? What type of really-reality? Who
is assuming to know what is (not) "really" happening?
7. "operate effectively" the
computer. What does this mean? Cf. the ignored
problems of human-computer interaction.
8. "for fitness, nor to reveal the
truth". Is this a distortion of philosophical pragmatism into
something close to Universal
Darwinism and Universal
evolution except for the latter's approach to Catholicism?
9. Does this whole paragraph not ignore
the meaning of the mathematization of
science, including the meaning of the book's initial desktop-metaphor?
10. Why does Hoffman not relate
consciousness and (how many, which) "conscious agents" to the
discipline of psychology - the Ego - and its roots in the history of
philosophy? Why only relate directly to the "brain" (neural
mechanisms) and akin to what in philosophy of science (p. 324f) has been called brain-mythology?
11. If beauty is included in perception,
then is it not necessary to define it unraveling the relations between beauty,
imagination, emotion, cognition, intuition and feelings? Does Hoffman also
relate Kant to these problems?
(A2) Presentation at amazon.com
of Donald Hoffman's book The case against reality:
Can we trust our
senses to tell us the truth? Challenging
leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective
reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while (1) we should
take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it
be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? (2) And how can our
senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with
these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work.
Ever since Homo sapiens has walked
the earth, natural selection has favored perception that hides the truth and
guides us toward useful action, shaping our senses to keep us alive and
reproducing. We observe a speeding car and do not walk in front of it; we see
mold growing on bread and do not eat it. These impressions, though, are not
objective reality. Just like a file icon on a desktop screen is a useful symbol
rather than a genuine representation of what a computer file looks like, the
objects we see every day are merely icons, allowing us to (3) navigate
the world safely and with ease.
The real-world implications for this
discovery are huge. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that
give the (4) illusion of a more “attractive” body
shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in
consumers, and even (5) dismantling the very notion that
spacetime is objective reality, The Case Against Reality dares
us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see.
QUESTIONS:
1. What does it mean "seriously", if we cannot (literally) know
reality and cannot at the perceptual point of time know whether the perceptions
are (by "tradition"?) or will be fit for survival?
2. To be useful by communicating or not communicating the truth, isn't it
the long-debates question of philosophical pragmatism? The reviewer Martin
tries to consider this later in his review by claiming that pragmatism is at
the level of knowledge, so that according to ITP it is at the level of the
interface rather than reality that it is of no use for ITP, which reduces it to
"fitness for survival"? Is this not a semantic game, while claiming
that reality practically is not accessible?
3. What does it mean to "navigate the [which?] world safely and with
ease? Is this not the problem of the meaning of human-computer
interaction?
4. What does it mean "illusion of a more attractive" body? Who
and how is able to tell whether it is an illusion that something is attractive,
relative to being really attractive, and for whom?
5. And
so what about "dismantling" it, if it helps to "navigate the
word safely, while the doubts about time and space are already treated by Carlo
Rovelli (loop quantum gravity and relational interpretation of quantum
mechanics, if it helps) considered elsewhere in this paper.
(B) John Waterworth and Ingvar Tjostheim: Integrating the world of presence theory:
ABSTRACT: We selected
four fragments from the (1) world of presence theory for particular attention.
These are: presence as (2) a perceptual illusion, as a (3) pretence, as
attending to an external world, and as (3) pretending the virtual is real. We
reflect on and try to unite these fragments into a fairly coherent and perhaps
more general view of the nature of presence, one that may help integrate
insights into both 'natural' and mediated presence. One conclusion from this
work is that when (4) we feel present, we believe that what is happening is
real, in the moment, whether it is in the physical world or in a virtual
reality (VR). In other words, when (5) we feel really present in an environment
it is real for us. If presence in VR is an illusion, so is presence in the
physical world. (7) Presence in VR requires imagination and belief (though not
make-believe), and so does presence in the physical world. [The whole text is accessible at the link already given above.]
QUESTIONS (and one author's answer=A
followed by next question=Q):
1. "world" of
presence? What is a world?
(Answer=A) This was the theme of the conference - the world of presence
(research).
(Question=Q) Does this mean that "world" is an implicit use of Set Theory and
that any set is a world? The term "world" seems to be very often used
in VR. Is it a way to avoid and do away with the problematic avoided
"reality", nor to mention truth?
2. "perceptual illusion" not same as (3)
"pretence"? (In American English: pretense)
(A) The author (Slater) meant pretence to mean a simulated semblance - not
necessarily the same as an optical illusion.
(Q) What is the difference except for the implicit hypothesis of a
goal-directed agent, and of an observer who is supposed to know that it is not
an optical illusion? And is the philosophical sublime a perceptual illusion or
an attending to the external world (= reality, and whatever attending means),
or a reality?
3. "pretending" not the same
"pretence"?
(A): not in this case - pretending is make-believing, as in a children's
pretend tea-party. it doesn't have much resemblance to the real thing, but the
participants make believe it is.
(Q) How many cases are there if not one for each use of the term? Who is
"God's eye" that decides that "doesn't have" much
resemblance and therefore defines when belief is "made"? By whom, by
the "objective observer"? Cf. Hegelian inquiring systems.
4. "when
we feel present" is
it not a [undefined] feeling?
(A) It is.
(Q) And then, who and how decides whether there is a presence or whether it is
(only said to be) felt? Wholly subjective, as the quality or effectiveness of
the VR-arrangement, as well as the reality of presence (for whom, vs.
"we" feel)?
5. "when
we feel…we believe…it is real for us". Feeling is believing?
(A) when we feel (true?) presence, it is - in that moment - real for us and we
believe it - cf. Spinoza.
(Q) Subjective and momentary (vs. objective) reality ("for us)? What about
the criticism of Spinoza? And is there any difference between the Kantian
painfully elaborated "sublime" and presence, except for that presence also deals with technology
and in banal daily situations/environments, and it has the pretense of
including the sublime? And
6. "in
the physical world or in virtual reality (VR)": not same as "or in the VR
world"? What is a world?
(A) It is the same in this case (VR, VR world). A world is what is experienced
(felt) as surrounding your body.
(Q) See point (1) above: Is the conference and its theme to be considered as
"surrounding your body" despite of the theme being in you
consciousness and your body being a part of the conference?
7. "Presence in VR requires
imagination and belief (though not make-believe)". What does the
make-belief? What about communion in the Christian mass, transubtantiation - the
conversion of the substance of the Eucharistic elements into the body and blood
of Christ at consecration, only the appearances of bread and wine still
remaining? Cf. Transformation symbolism in the mass.
(A) Not quite sure what you mean. Like a children's
tea party, as I said. Is the mass like that?
(Q) Does it mean that you consider your own and e.g. Christians' feeling of
"presence" at a mass and communion as analog to their participation
at children's tea party? Is this (whose) explanation of the behavior of most
humans?
Acknowledging that all the above is based on three text that are only
abstracts, I find that the theorizing above about VR and presence, especially
in the reviewer Martin's extensions of Hoffman's book (nor included above)
gives an overwhelmingly convincing, mind-blowing impression of connecting
everything to everything. It is an ad-hoc logical network that in philosophy
of science has been called a Leibnizian inquiring system with all its shortcomings. In
particular it suffers of shortcomings in not explicitly relating the issue of
cognition, feeling, perception, imagination, belief, reality etc. to any
philosophy. Implicitly it claims to be a whole new (VR-) universal philosophy.
It starts with the problematic philosophical synthesis by Immanuel Kant, and
its consequent development into various, often unidentified, kinds of
psychology. I try to explain this in my essay
on Kant and its apparent influence on computerization such as VR, and on
conceptions of art and design (or "attractiveness"?) that are also
involved in the speculations about presence. The rough conclusion is that
religion may be seen as legitimately referring to a "type of
reality", and that the supposedly "physical" reality is not of
the type that can be assumed when asking the then meaningless question about
the "existence" of God. This is even less so when adducing the doubts
about time and space as by Carlo Rovelli (loop quantum gravity and relational
interpretation of quantum mechanics, if it helps) considered elsewhere in this paper.
Hoffman finds that a perceptual system designed to recognise what is
useful to survival will nearly always beat a perceptual system that sees the
truth. and that, as the result of evolution, our
entire perceptual apparatus, namely the way that our minds interpret sensory
inputs, is designed for fitness, not to reveal the truth that is not available
to humans. As far as there is documented past, religion is considered to have
existed at all times and have shown fitness for survival in all cultures all
over the world. This except for the last few centuries in what has been called
as a peninsula called Europe, located in the extreme west of the Eurasian
continent, where a secularized population has been decreasing and is being
maintained by immigration. Being so, the question arises of why atheism is
advocated there in the name of science and of the non-reality or untruth of
God, while it is claimed that humans are driven by a perceptual apparatus that
has evolved for fitness to survival. God and gods have been and are present for
most of the humanity with "presence" that is enabled by elaborated
liturgy or ceremonial rituals, contributing to its obvious fitness for survival
through generations, even while their reality is put into question by
VR-theorizing.
Against such a
background, VR can be seen as a "bombardment" of the "black
box" of the
perceptual and nervous system, akin to what is done with drugs, in spiritual and religious contexts, with smart and designer drugs, or
for recreational purposes. VR
is mainly recreational despite of, as all technology, being usable for other
uses including educational ones. In our context of the present paper, however,
it is especially interesting to realize that it can unconsciously fulfill
spiritual and religious (real, virtual or "presential"?) needs that
most of its developers, theorists and users are eager to negate under the
constructed banner of "make believe".
Information on: Christianism or Atheism
A generalization and extension of the above is
represented by discussions between Christians and atheists as exemplified in a
couple of essays that for reasons of space are not reproduced here but can be
found on the net with the title Information on: Christianism or Atheism and Logic and Rape. It consists of two parts, the first one
containing the account of the discussion between a Christian and an atheist,
and the second consisting of a series of e-mail exchanged between a person who
can be seen as an atheist or agnostic, and a spiritualist influenced by
Anthroposophy.
Miracles, Myth, Reality
and Truth
Something similar to the above can be said about supernatural events or
miracles that are narrated in the Bible. To begin with, if God intervenes with
miracles, it appears to me as obvious that they must be exceptionally rare, as
much rare as encounters with God himself, whose impact would be disruptive for
the very limited human psyche as overpowering passions are. They would be
disruptive even for the human reliance upon the capability to deal daily with
the physical world.
Besides that, it is not clear what is reality is if it is not artificially
limited to scientistic physical reality. This is may also suggested
by reflecting upon the relation between reality and truth. In order to
differentiate between myth, reality, and truth it is indeed necessary to
understand what myth is, when it is not as often today in popular language,
equated to falsity or lie. Myth is, instead, what has historically been studied
as one part of the relation between Mythos, Eros and Logos, something that lives today in remnants
such as the web site mythos/logos as well
as in the theory and practice of analytical psychology. The complexity and
confusion of the matter can be inferred from such encyclopedic accounts like
the Christ Myth Theory, enough for an understanding that there is much that is not understood,
as little understood as what is "to believe" vs. "to know".
To all this can be added that the accounts of all historically famous
personalities with great impact are in different degrees wrapped and disguised
by later myths where it becomes practically impossible to remount to simple
personally observable events, if one only knew what a (true or real)
observation is or should be. Sallustius is quoted being the source of
the famous Myths are things which never happened, but always are. Or,
as found among his quotes:
One may call the world
a myth, in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds
hidden. Besides, to wish to
teach the whole truth about the Gods to all produces contempt in the foolish,
because they cannot understand, and lack of zeal in the good, whereas to
conceal the truth by myths prevents the contempt of the foolish, and compels
the good to practice philosophy.[...]
Now these things never happened, but always are. And mind sees all things at once, but reason (or speech) expresses
some first and others after. Thus, as the myth is in accord with the cosmos, we
for that reason keep a festival imitating the cosmos, for how could we attain
higher order? [...] A number of sources paraphrase the first sentence [...] as
"Myths are things which never happened, but always are."
A masterly description of what can be understood as mythic, considering that
Carl Jung's exposition in his Collected Works is too complex
for the casual reader, is found in Eric J. Leed's rendering (in The
Mind of the Traveler, p. 138 and 148). Leed refers to the
tourists' occasional "feeling of immensity" and meaning, which
recalls the Kantian concept of "sublime" and many historical experiences of the divinely meaningful as
already explained in analytical psychology:
The frisson of the tourist, often reported
by travelers encountering an emplaced cultural icon for the first time, might
be seen as an experience of meaning, a sudden coherence felt between the
fictive and the real, the imagined and the actual. Marking
the conjucture of dreamed, unconscious landscapes with an observed
reality in present time, it is an experience of the continuities of time and
space that underlie the contiguities of eras and
constructed boundaries.[...]
[M]ythicization of landscape
testifies to the importance of text in the creation of meaningful topography
and to the fact that myth and fable are both instruments in the creation of a
meaningful world, as well as conditions for actual and authentic experience.
But it is not necessary to go so far: it would be enough to try to
understand the core of modern physics as represented by quantum mechanics -
quantum physics. The concepts of reality and of fact are put in question and
the mystery is seen to have influenced some of the main involved scientists to
search deeper meanings in spirituality. This was done by searching it in
Eastern thought, when the Western expression in Christianity was not
understood. This is suggested, for instance, by the example of the physicist
Wolfgang Pauli who is said to have left Catholicism but returned to some of its
main tenets by searching his way in Carl Jung's analytical psychology that
could have been a bridge to it. More on this in a section about quantum
mechanics in my text Computers as embodied mathematics and logic. In a
final note in that section I write:
Early in the year 1996 I obtained a copy of an extremely relevant Swedish doctoral dissertation at Uppsala university (Dept. of History of
Science and Ideas, ISBN 91-506-1140-2) by Suzanne Gieser involving
the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel-prize winner in year 1945 (cf. lecture 1946, esp. the next to last paragraph), as pioneer of QM. I cannot discuss
here this forgotten dissertation but can recommend it for its depth and
coverage. It ends in mind-blowing complexity that, however, does not include
the problematics of abuse of esoteric mathematics and logic at the interface
between philosophy of science and theology. Such problematics, however, can be
read in the mentioning of psychic distress and life-crises of some of the
scientists. There are no comments (Gieser, pp. 21-36) on how Pauli left the Roman Catholic Church and later may have tried Jung's psychology as a
substitute, instead of as a bridge back to it. The dissertation was edited and
translated into English as The Innermost Kernel. Depth Psychology and Quantum
Physics: Wolfgang Pauli's Dialogue with C.G. Jung. (2010, hard
cover 2005). Springer Verlag. Berlin and Heidelberg, (ISBN 978-3-642-05881-3).
The issues in the present text are discussed mainly in (in the Swedish edition's)
part 1, chap. 3, and part 3 chap. 5. I comment this dissertation and book more
in detail in my essay on Quantum Mechanics, Computers and Psychology.
For the rest, after writing my text with the final quotation, and making
a browser-search on technics, science and Jung, I happened to find the
following improbable reference: Carl Gustav Jung, Quantum Physics and the Spiritual
Mind: A Mystical Vision of the Twenty-First Century [found
also here], in Behavioral
Science (Basel) 2013 Dec; 3(4): 601-618. I find it focused upon QM in
its relation to (again) mainly Eastern thought, but it cannot address the
abuses of mathematics and logic such as those related to QM. My text is focused
upon the mathematics and logic that else is taken for granted and abused, and
upon religion as Christianity whose doctrine also can be logically abused.
Requests for Proof as requests for Power
When discussing the question of existence and its relation to love and agape
mentioned earlier it is convenient to consider also humans' requirement that
God should give (us the capability of constructing?) "proofs" of its
"existence" or "power" or allow himself to be
"tested" in a "trial". This disregards the philosophical
problem of "existence" (see above) and also disregards the fact
that Christian religion can be seen as differing from e.g. Islam in that it
gives priority to love over power. This is particularly interesting when noting
that feminism is often based upon the reference to, and the request for power.
Referring once again to the same book by Fichte as above, in one of the appendixes
of the book dealing with Sur les Intentions de la Mort
de Jésus [On the Intentions of Jesus' Death, pp. 195-216] the
author explains why Jesus is seen to be supposed to die in order to fulfill the
Christian message, relinquishing the recourse to power.
Conversion motivated by power does not square with
Christianity. Jesus did not found a political party or a terrorist
organization (cf. my blog entry on terrorism) in order to overthrow the Roman empire, as it has been
historically expected of a Jewish Messiah. A "proof" would also imply
a display of power instead of love, despite the rhetorical differentiation
between the force of argument and argument of force. It is also a display of (the pride of)
power to show that one does not need love, as the atheist who feels pride for
his super human "Nietzschean" capability to endure suffering without the "illusion"
of false solace in a future afterlife based upon dependence upon a loving
mighty God. This is analog to the “existentialist” emphasis on a proud individual “responsibility” that defines a
supposed meaning of life and allows to declare a “radical atheism”. The interesting thing is that proofs do
not appear to be valid or relevant not even regarding love between humans. The
lover who hopes to entice the loved one as humans who desire God' attention and
love will not start by requiring the loved one to give proofs of being worthy
to be loved, since loveliness cannot be empirically or logically verified. Who
is the God to be loved? The answer is: understand and feel the sacred books,
the Bible, which is the most discussed, challenged and tested text of at least
the Western world. Most genuinely faithful Christians and others learn to love
God by being passionately moved to love by the tales in the sacred books where
apparent grimness, harshness, hardheartedness and strictness, describe
humanity's progressive understanding of a loving God.
The lover who hopes to conquer the loved one will modestly pass a
"proof" of himself by offering or sacrificing
something valuable in the hope to entice. The lover will not offer a supposedly
rational rebuttal to an "atheist" who questions his (her) love by
claiming that the chosen object of love may be not worthy because of
untrustworthiness, ultimate ugliness, or stupidity. For some (problematic) food
for thought, see the psychoanalytic vs. Jungian views about "regression in the service of the ego". So it
will also be when a subordinate wishes to awake the attention of a manager or
master. Somebody looking for or hoping to employed at a company, as a human who
hopes for God's love and attention, will not go to the manager requiring proofs
that the manager is proficient and that the company is deserving his
contribution when it is his own responsibility to investigate and understand
that. On the contrary, the candidate will prepare himself fulfilling the
beloved's expectations, hoping for the best. If not, the project
will doomed to failure from the very beginning, and the initial
mistrust will turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The ultimate cause of
it all is related to "Ego inflation" (cf. above and below).
From Science to
Philosophy, to Religion
But there is still more to it. I think that religions in general and
Christianity in particular, beyond the definitions
of religion itself, can be seen as resumes or
systematization of personal experiences, including commonalities in tacit
knowledge. They
can be seen as "languages" for exposition and discussion of ultimate
basic values and key words or images of a culture. Often, unconsciously for
most people, they stay at the base of the intellectual and moral systems that
sustain the remaining ordinary language and mutual understanding,
notwithstanding love. This may paradoxically explain if not justify the
fundamental causes of conflicts and wars as they rely on the possibility
of communication. If husband and wife must divorce or combat each
other, if they cannot communicate with each other, the same with or
among children and relatives, how and why should strangers, groups and nations
be able to avoid murder and the tragedies of wars?
Religions may and should be seen as standing at the basis or as being the
presuppositions of philosophy. In this context I was struck by an affirmation
found in Prolegomena till Arya Metafysik [Prolegomena to
Arya Metaphysics, Norstedt & Söner, 1917] by Sri Ananda Acharya and introduced as "public
lectures held over epistemological, ontological and cosmological theories of
ancient Hindu in India", in front of an international auditorium
at Stockholm's College (later University) aula during the academic
year 1915-1916. On page 242 in introducing empirical psychology (as announced
in the table of contents, p. XII) he writes the same I perceived in my
readings, that "where science ends, philosophy begins, and where
philosophy ends, religion begins." Considering that
psychology arised out of philosophy this quotation has a meaning in
common with that of the pioneer of quantum physics Werner
Heisenberg. He expressed his interest in the relation between science and religionespecially in
his book Across the Frontiers, chapter "Scientific and religious truth" (pp. 213-229), and in
his quote from Quirks of the Quantum Mind, p. 175:
Of course, we all know that our own reality depends on the structure of our
consciousness; we can objectify no more than a small part of our world. But
even when we try to probe into the subjective realm, we cannot ignore the
central order…In the final analysis, the central order, or 'the one' as it used
to be called and with which we commune in the language of religion, must win
out.
We in the West have to walk this path if and when we feel that science does not
reach beyond certain limits, as it may or should be the case of hate, war,
environmental pollution, climate change, and sustainability. If we try to walk
the bridge from science to philosophy we are swamped by a perceived
multiplicity and confusion of numerous philosophers and schools. We may,
however, get help if we recall the difficult meaning of a
famous quote by the mathematician and philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead, that
"The safest general characterization
of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of
footnotes to Plato."
And Plato himself is thought to have, in a way, intuitively announced an image
of Jesus Christ in his second book of the Republic, section
361e. He writes there, most famously, about what I understand as a hypothetical
or archetypal perfect man who exceptionally would stand above the law
(something that Socrates would not do, motivating his famous suicide), becoming
he himself the law:
"... the just man will have to endure the lash, the rack, chains, the
branding iron in his eyes, and finally, after every extremity of suffering, he
will be crucified ..."
In fact, one cannot speak of Western thought's ground in Plato's (and
Aristotle's?) philosophy without considering the decisive complement by the
Bible and Jesus Christ, together with their integration with Greek philosophy
achieved by Thomas Aquinas. This is disregarding modern thinkers who
have the ambition of being modern light variants of or digressions from Thomas
Aquinas' ideals, such as Franz von Baader, Johann Georg Hamann,
Antonio Rosmini, Bernard Lonergran, Hans Urs von Balthasar,
Eric Voegelin, Pietro Ubaldi or Joseph Ratzinger himself -
former cardinal and later pope Benedict XVI, writing about Conscience
and Truth. The latter is today most relevant to
scientists and fundamentalists who explicitly or implicitly claim to follow
their own (or the "users'?) conscience in their work. Then the earlier
"footnotes to Plato" can be supplanted by "footnotes to Plato
and the Bible" and perhaps to the encyclicals. This is not to say that,
for instance, Plato, Aquinas and others cannot be criticized and explained
away, but that it is necessary to understand and take stance in all these
matters before one condemns the basic value of religion in the name of
modernity, postmodernity, poststructuralism, reason, science, spiritualism or
whatever. At the time I thought it was fun that the father of my best friend in
youth, perceiving that we youngsters were growing into atheism, admonished him
to not let himself go into it before reading and understanding Aquinas' Summa
Theologica.
Nowhere have I seen a clearer example of the shifting from science to
philosophy and further to religion or theology as in the development of quantum
physics, also called quantum mechanics. This development illustrates a
problematization of reality (cf. "virtual"
reality, above), which is also a problematization of
existence, of facts and of time, recalling the references to Carlo Rovelli in
this text. It also recalls the previous section on miracles,
myth, reality and truth, and finally the classical question of
"existence" of God.
It is also characterized by a complexity that appears in the form of
abuse of science. In one case it is abuse for the cause of feminism. Trying to
avoid an abuse of concept of science it is launched under the banner of interdisciplinary academic field of gender studies,
which, however, in the Swedish version was translated as outright gender science ("genusvetenskap").
In discussing what I perceive as a shift from science to psychology, and
from there to religion (and further "back" to politics, cf. above), I devoted a special
chapter of another essay to this phenomenon, in the context of conceiving
computers as embodied logic and mathematics. In order not to burden the present
text with excessive volume I take the liberty to address the reader to the mentioned
chapter.
Dealing Modestly with
the Unknown - Deflated Ego
Besides all this one can see religion as a need for a way to deal with what we do not know and cannot have faith (belief?) that
it can be known or will ever be known, while we must live and act upon this
premise. For pedagogical purposes one can compare this situation with that of
wanting and claiming to marry and promise to love for the rest of one's life
someone who obviously is (still?) "unknown". In particular we do not
know to which extent reason and the will (that
we do not seem to know what they are) can harness instincts or the
"unconscious". Cf. the by now famous movement #MeToo. In fact the philosophical
concept of "the unconscious" can be seen as an expression of
this need. In atheism, however, there is the hidden assumption, faith or belief
that we either know, or that rationally we must believe that
it is question of time for knowing progressively more and more, and will
asymptotically reach a godly knowledge that either will make us gods or prove
that gods do not "exist". I did already mention in another paper that
the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel prize winner and also pioneer of quantum
physics is quoted as having expressed about his
atheist colleague Paul Dirac that the latter's guiding principle was
"There is no God and Paul Dirac is His prophet". Psychologically such
godly identification that I also showed is found in top mathematicians,
amounts to what I also mention on several occasions, namely "ego
inflation". At its extreme it is depicted and discussed by Carl Jung in
e.g. his "Phenomena resulting from the assimilation of the
unconscious" (Collected Works, CW vol. 7, p. 139ff, §221 ff.)
I find that this problem of ego inflation is correlate to the incapability of
relativize oneself, to see oneself from the outside, to see that our
observations can themselves be observed. For instance, in a secular
country youngsters in general and young or middle aged scientists learn
quite early to claim that elders gradually think more and more about the
afterlife and religion because of the fear of impending death. Nevertheless, it
may also be the other way round if the observers are observed:
younger people allow themselves to not think about it all because of their
estimated distance to death. It makes them feel immortal, or they feel that
they can postpone the question indefinitely. Elders may know this because they
have been young but not the other way round. This is often ignored by
boiling down convictions to the conviction the one is following one's own conscience, whatever
it is or should be, while ignoring the ultimate meaning of Conscience
and Truth mentioned above.
In other words: it is a matter of really understanding that one's counterpart
may know things we do not know and is really convinced that our judgment is
wrong, in the same way and to the same extent as we are convinced that his is.
Such ignorance of others also lays at the basis of autistic behavior. In other words, the observer is observed and can be
perceived in all its smallness and ignorance. In sytems theory
for The Design of Inquiring Systems
this corresponds to so called
Hegelian inquiring systems (esp. pp. 153-159, with applications to the Internet),
while atheist technicians-scientists seem to base themselves in
Leibnizian-Lockean and misunderstood Singerian inquiring systems (chaps.
2,5,9). In psychology it leads to the insight that "a man can know even less about God than an ant can know about the
contents of the British Museum" (quote from C.G.
Jung, CW7, p. 235n, §394n.) In this context I acknowledge that I am
"critical" Hegelian, or "Churchmaniac" or
"Jungian", something that Churchman and Jung themselves warned
against. Or, as Jung himself expresses it in The Nature of the
Psyche (Collected Works, CW 8, p. 169f. §357-360):
"All the same, every science is a function of the psyche, and all
knowledge is rooted in it. The psyche is the greatest of all cosmic wonders and
the sine qua non of the world as an object. It is in
the highest degree odd that Western man [...] apparently pays so little regard
to this fact. Swamped by the knowledge of external objects, the subject of all
knowledge has been temporarily eclipsed to the point of seeming non-existence.
[...]
With the discovery of a possible unconscious psychic realm [...] the validity
of conscious knowledge was questioned in an altogether different and more
menacing way than it had ever been by the procedures of epistemology. The
latter put certain bounds to human knowledge in general, from which
post-Kantian German Idealism struggled to emancipate itself: but natural science
and common sense accommodated themselves to it without much difficulty, if they
condescended to notice it at all. Philosophy fought against it in the interest
of an antiquated pretension of the human mind to be able to pull itself up by
its own bootstraps and know things that were outside the range of human
understanding. The victory of Hegel over Kant dealt the gravest blow to reason
and to the further development of the German and, ultimately, of the European
mind, all the more dangerous as Hegel was a psychologist in disguise who
projected great truths out of the subjective sphere into a cosmos he himself
had created. [...] The forces compensating this calamitous development
personified themselves in the later Schelling, partly in Schopenhauer and Carus,
while on the other hand that unbridled 'Bacchantic God' whom Hegel had already
scented in nature finally burst upon us in Nietzsche. [...]
A philosophy like Hegel's is a self-revelation of the psychic background and,
philosophically, a presumption. Psychologically, it amounts to an invasion by
the unconscious. The peculiar high-flown language Hegel uses bears out this
view: it is reminiscent of the megalomanic language of
schizophrenics, who use terrific spellbinding words to reduce the transcendent
to subjective form, to give banalities the charm of novelty, or pass off
commonplaces as searching wisdom. So bombastic a terminology is a symptom of
weakness, ineptitude, and lack of substance.
The latter sentences about bombastic terminology recall not only the philosophy
of Hegel and Heidegger but in our contexts also recent affirmations about the
future of superintelligent computer-AI, technological singularity,
theory of everything, etc. Not to mention the bombastic terminology of psycho-political
theorizing in LGBT-talk, e.g. intersectionality, quantum field theory in feminist theory, LGBTQIA-Glossary, "TERF = "Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists".
Or others who ignore the historically and Christianly conceived structure and
dynamics of the psyche, and undermine the family as base of society in favor of
"constellations" that could have been called clusters. The text
quoted above is completed (p. 170, §359) with an explanation of how new
definitions of God appeared in Schopenhauer as the unconscious Will,
in Carus as the Unconscious, and in Hegel as the practical equation
of philosophical reason with Spirit, (I would add: in Freud as sexuality),
"thus making possible that intellectual juggling with the object which
achieved such a horrid brilliance in his philosophy of the State."
Spirit and Reason or Thought, with capital S, R and T, recall Rudolf
Steiner's anthroposophy and all modern talk about
spirit, interpreted as implying that "there are no essential limits to
human knowledge". Or, as in the view of existentialist philosopher Lev Shestov: key quote "...we need to think that only one assertion has or can
have any objective reality: that nothing on earth is impossible. Every time
someone wants to force us to admit that there are other, more limited and
limiting truths, we must resist with every means we can lay hands on".
This is the difficult and problematic question that is considered in terms of
conscience by cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the above mentioned essay
on Conscience and Truth.
It is indeed startingly ostentatious to imagine that the less than
1500 cubic centimeters of individual brain substance and its bodily
ramifications, which we do not really understand the origin and functional
capacity of, should be able to embrace the whole universe from which they have
originate. Cf. the well known video on micro-macro views of the
zoomed universe in The
Cosmic Eye where, symptomatically, the observer
of the video usually forgets who is the observer and who, if not "God
eye", conceived the video's images". If notwithstanding it all, the
brain were able to do so, it could only be because it has the godly
imprint from where it originated, and it would be able to modestly acknowledge
it in modest religiosity instead of attributing it all to a cheap
"complexity". This attitude is suggested by the Ego-deflating
famous prayer of cardinal Merry del Val, in
the spirit of the even more famous Imitation of Christ both contrasting the
misunderstandings embodied in the Nordic conception of the Ego boasting message
in the Law of Jante. The
mentioned attitude of modesty is probably implied by all Catholic
scientists, lay and clergy, who obviously have intelligently squared
their faith with their lifelong scientific endeavor beyond scientism.
Behaving Human Beings -
Simple as Ants
Paradoxically, on the other hand, an atheistic response to all this has been to
equate the intelligence of humans and ants, attributing a human apparent
complexity to its brain's reaction to a complex environment. In The Sciences of the Artificial, (1969, p. 25, 53, summary here), a book classified as Science and Philosophy, Herbert Simon who is an
"icon" in the history of Artificial Intelligence (AI) explores a
hypothesis, which by raising numerous critical comments in academic journals
paradoxically contributed to his prestige in citation indexes:
In this chapter I should like to explore this hypothesis but with the word
'human' being substituted for 'ant' [...] A man, viewed as a behaving system,
is quite simple. The apparent complexity of his behavior over time is largely a
reflection of the complexity of the environment in which he finds itself.
[...]
I consider this an example of what an abusively prolific mathematical
mind whose behavior is as simple as that of an ant, can achieve in
several fields, up to the level of a Nobel prize, when it does not understand
the essence and limitations of mathematics and logic as indicated by the previously
mentioned Jan Brouwer, and today are abused in the divinized, so-called Artificial
General Intelligence and ChatGPT. It can be
paradoxically the case that the apparent complexity of Herbert Simon's mind is
largely a reflection of the complexity of the question that he considered. It
would also be interesting to see whether the behavior of an ant entering the
British Museum is complex enough as to suggest a kind of
"understanding" of that environment. The publication of Simon's
thoughts, in any case, may have influenced West Churchman who also was one of
the book's reviewers to accelerate the publication of his The Design of
Inquiring Systems, which may be considered as a rejoinder to Simon's
book. This is clearly suggested in Churchman's review of Simon's book under the
title "The artificiality of science" in Contemporary
Psychology (Vol. 15, No. 6, June 1970, p. 385f.) Simon's obituary
in The Economist (February 24th 2001, p. 103) refers his
answer to the question "What about the soul?": "No one, he said,
would tell him what the soul was. When someone did, he said thoughtfully, he
would program one."
Going over to the next reflection, I think that one main difficulty in
reasoning about God is that definitionally we cannot "comprehend"
something that is "more" than us, in the sense that an ant cannot
comprehend the British Museum. But it is also so that just because of this very
same reason the human mind cannot put up with the anthropomorphism of
the God image, if an image is to be allowed at all, which it is not in
certain religions.
The main problem seems to be that man, represented by a big Ego, cannot conceive of being observed in all its smallness by a still
bigger Ego or a Self in
terms of analytic psychology. This despite of the daily experience of parents
regarding their naïve immature children. The parents cannot imagine being
children, if not ants (despite of they being created
in His image), in relation to a God suggested by Revelation, that is a necessarily defective human conception, and more of a way of
relating to the unknown and unknowable as suggested by a doubtfully
mathematized cosmology with its Lambda-CDM model, and its absurd dimensions including chronology. The representation of God as an old man with a white beard certainly
repels many people for appearing "childish" but it can only refer
artistically, rhetorically and psychologically to the archetype of the wise
old man, impersonated by “old professors” or men with long white beard, and in Christianity by aged prophets. Besides the explanations of what this implies as found in analytic
psychology, there are some rhetorically powerful observations in the
presentations of "transrationality" displayed in videos such as about "the existence of
God", to which I return in the last section of this essay about
"Reflections on criticism".
The best explanation and justification I know of this difficult and necessarily
defective, archetypal anthropomorphism, which recalls the artifice of analogy, is to be found in an account of C.S. Lewis being quoted as
saying: (since I cannot find the original where I found this, may I refer also
to accounts found in The Image of Man in C.S.
Lewis, p.
43, by William Luther White, and The Legitimacy of Miracle, p. 160, by Robert Larmer):
When [people] try to get rid of manlike,
or as they are called 'anthropomorphic' images, they merely succeed in
substituting images of other kinds."...."If a man watches his own
mind, I believe he will find that what profess to be specially advanced or
philosophic conceptions of God [e.g. 'spiritual force'] are, in his thinking,
always accompanied by vague images which, if inspected, would turn out to be
even more absurd than the manlike images aroused by Christian theology. For
man, after all, is the highest of the things we meet in sensuous
experience."
Here we have, however, a paradox that has implications for the modern atheistic
conceptions of artificial intelligence - AI - and the so called technological singularity where artificial
"superintelligence", prior to understanding what intelligence is or
should be, is in my opinion preposterously supposed to be or to become superior
to the humans. In this way, based on a misunderstanding of logic and
mathematics that I consider elsewhere in connection with Jan Brouwer, it
is shown that there is a devaluation of the human being that also devaluates
our possible apprehension of the divine, or devaluates psychologically the
divine. This is also applicable to the devaluation of human-computer
interaction - HCI - since it "imposes" (a facilitation of) a certain
human behavior that is necessary for the given function of a "given"
computer system that is increasingly perceived as a superintelligence. Devaluation of God and of the human being go
together.
Love and Evolutionary
Self-Preservation
The next question is to ask ourselves what do we feel and what does it mean
when we say that we "love" our spouses - today symptomatically
"partners" - or our children. Today, also symptomatically, I have
heard materialist engineers who prefer to say that they "like" their
spouses and children, as if it was a question of preferring some among dishes
of a menu at a restaurant. Anyway, the point is that the intensity of love, to
the point of being ready to sacrifice one's own life in order to save the loved
one, requires an answer to the question of "wherefrom" comes this
love and readiness that supersedes the own personal conservation instinct.
Materialist atheists are often ready to claim that this is a sublimation of the
own conservation and sexual instinct as a function of evolution that requires a
preservation of the next generation or, as it goes today, of the own
"DNA-imprint" in a sociobiological sense. It will always be possible
by means of abuse of logic to construct arguments for such
hypothesis and it has already been done in much of existentialism and in other
published books like Finding Purpose in a Godless World. In
the meantime evolutionary geneticist Svante
Pääbo "hopes to point up the differences that enabled humans, unlike the
Neanderthals, with whom they interbred, to build complex societies" and confesses in
an interview at the Swedish Radio (15 dec. 2019) that
he is puzzled by the "emotional" component in evolution. All this
while geneticists inquire into DNA-information without problematizing what
information is, to begin with (cf. my text on the "infological equation".)
An alternative complementary hypothesis in the spirit of the present essay is
to claim, as suggested in analytic psychology, that we have the divine within
us, and that we reproduce towards our "neighbour" the very same love
that it is said that God and Jesus has for us. So, in this sense,
what we feel is the same that God feels for us and that we are
"programmed" to feel for our neighbour to begin with the
closest one. Or as in Mark 12:31: "Love your neighbor as
yourself", which disposes of the relation between love and instinct of
conservation. Furthermore, it is consistent with analytic psychology's
conception of such love as an general and "sexual" attraction
to the own soul through the projection of the contrasexual anima or animus upon the loved one, as suggested in my essay on Reason and Gender. It is a psychological conception that is based on empirical evidence
and analogously abstract as apparently absurd conceptions of, say, a
problematic quantum physics. This is done in order that the projections may
gradually be withdrawn with the consequence of learning to know
"oneself" at the same time that one learns to know the
"other" and the common divine in us all. All this being a base for
discussion of the meaning of human brotherhood (having a common Father, despite
of it being renamed "solidarity"), divorce as desertion or
abandonment by God, jealousy, and homosexuality that nowadays are taken for
given. Not to mention misunderstandings at the work place and in
computer-mediated communications.
A historical classic objection to religion is that it impairs scientific
inquiry - as often exemplified by the complex and controversial Galileo affair. Wikipedia's account clarifies the complexity and also justifies my
refrainment from expanding this question within the space and scope of the
present text of mine. Nevertheless, from the systemic point of view of
"information" it is important to underline that information is not
"atomic", not even "molecular", but rather global or
systemic in the sense that the divulgation acceptance of one so called fact or
piece of information but not others, within a global context, can be
interpreted wrongly, having consequences that are enormous, and possibly
calamitous. This is symptomatically obvious when practically nobody in this
world appreciates to broadcast certain details about personal and family life
since it can be disastrous because, despite of being "true", they can
be "misinterpreted" when not accompanied by an ethical total
understanding. Not to mention the way secrets of state and espionage or counterintelligence are regarded in all nations of the world, as exemplified in the
Assange (and consequently Snowden) affair that I have considered in Wikileaks, Information and Systems and whose story has been later summarized in the
documentary Hero
or villain? The Prosecution of Julian Assange. What is to be allowed to be considered as a public
"fact"? The complexity of the question can
be also intuited in a likewise complex theater play, The Wild Duck, by the Norwegian play writer Henrik
Ibsen, displaying a man who "insists on pursuing the absolute truth",
or the "summons of the Ideal", and "meddles in the affairs of a
strange family, producing disastrous results."
The complexity of the question of fact vs. hypothesis and theory, beyond the
reach of normal laymen, is also suggested by the curious fact that so late as
the year 2007 a book was published with the title Galileo was wrong: the Church was right.
For the rest, see the account given by the Catholic Education Resource Center
under the title itself The Galileo Affair. Similar apologetic efforts could be made and have been make for other
"affairs" such as the Crusades or the Inquisition, or now the
problems of pedophilia of which Swedish readers kan check my account
elsewhere, in a blog entry. Nevertheless they incur into
the impossibilities that
I explained about "debate" on
complex matters. Therefore they can make matters worse (cf New Oxford Review, Sept. 2005), and exceed the scope of
this text. The causes of these affairs have become "historical" and
belong to the cultural heritage of Christianity, being also related to the
general attacks on Christianity, presupposing e.g. secular
religion or state individualism, to the point of justifying various
entries in encyclopedias such as Criticism of Christianity, and Persecution of Christians in the Modern Era.
The case of pedophilia illustrates another aspect of the problem of the Ego as
related to criticism and persecution of Christians. Many atheists are irritated
by perceiving that religious persons in general and Christians in particular
claim to be better people. They do not know that one main tenet in Christianity
is the recognition that we all are sinners. Therefore they delight in
being able to denounce whenever Christians and especially priests also are
shown to be sinners, the more so if they are worse or worst sinners, don't mind
about relative statistics in the population. This gives the advantage of being
able to think and say: "you should shut up in trying to convert us and
better to start blaming and improving
yourself". Additionally they can say to themselves: "if the
others supposedly holy Christians do this, then I myself who do not profess to
be a better man also can do it". They do not imagine that the Christian
can respond by confessing that he is also a sinner (with the advantage of
confessing and repenting) but that this does not mean that the sin is not a sin
to be avoided by all of us. All this may stand behind what has become a hype,
the condemnation of pedophilia in the Catholic Church, as if other Christian
denominations were less affected. It motivated my writing a special
insert in my private blog (in Swedish). Catholic priests (and
nuns) are also human. Disregarding comparisons of percentages of pedophiles in
the Church compared to its number in charitable associations, other communities
(including the United Nations peacekeepers) and the society at
large, a main question arises: what is the percentage of those who
are outraged by this perversion compared with that those who approve,
foster, and practice the Western "sexual revolution" with
"indecent exposures" and provocative pornography, as if it had
nothing to do with pedophilia. It is opportunely not even mentioned in
its Wikipedia's article on the generally approved sexual
revolution (except for one occasional mention of "child
exploitation", accessed October 24th, 2018). One has to go to history of
"Obscenity" (Swedish "förargelseväckande beteende"
in order to be reminded of what has happened to the watered-down sources of
temptations that victimize humans.
Returning from the digression to the case of Galileo a point of view that I
have not seen considered but it is appropriate in this context is to note that
the Church more or less consciously was apprehensive for the possible
consequences of the one-sided affirmation and divulgation of
the heliocentric doctrines of Galileo, as it became later apprehensive about
the sexual revolution. The consequences of the Galileo-story became real in the
sense that Western thought, under the pressure of scientism and shortcomings of
theology, became mistrustful of the truth of all of the
Church's teachings. This leads ultimately to consequences such as the
strengthening of present Western atheism championed by Sweden, probably the
most commented, secularized, predominantly
"Lutheran" country of the world. Maybe the Church could have
addressed this question sooner after the Galileo event, but this may have
considered as insurmountable because of all the difficulties implied in
societal debate on such a complex matter, as I suggest in my
essay of "Debate". Christianity itself could have been a
way to allow for a common ground, set of basic values, for debate as it has
been in past Europe. An early confession of mistaken judgment, however could
have been a mistake in the sense that it was not a mistake: the freed and
unbridled Galilean (as Darwin's evolutionary) partial knowledge equaled a lie
that may have had immediate, cumulative, irreversible and deleterious
secularizing effects. The understanding of such a process in the context of
Ibsen's drama mentioned above can then be an indication of Ibsen's genius.
This question of "Galilean facts" may stand behind the modern
problematization of "fake news" or "alternative facts", as
I have indirectly have explained
in the context of debates.
Facts include value laden costly choice among numerous facts, including
politically risky and costly theory-laden measurement beyond naive pure
observation. People who feel that they cannot afford the effort and the cost of
choice or creative measurement and divulgation of facts can be tempted to
create and cheat with cheap facts of own fabrication, which counter official
but systemically false established truths. Analog problems may be encountered
today also in the problematization of climate
change or global warming, and of evolution (facts, hypotheses, theories, truth) as related to the
hypothesis of "intelligent
design", e.g. in its more moderate
versions, such as represented by the work of Michael Behe, or in the criticism of neo-Darwinism by the above mentioned David
Gelernter in "Giving up Darwin" (Claremont Review of
Books, Nr. 2, Spring 2019).
Long after having written the above text, in mid-2021, something happened that
gives food for further thought, as
reported by the public service Swedish Television.
The leader of the Swedish Christian Democrats' party pleaded guilty to gross
slander after the tours around a dispute about the purchase of a house from an
elderly man. At the same time, she writes that she "in heart and
soul" considers herself innocent of the crime and that the facts she has
presented are true. “It would be a negative development if it were allowed to
spread everything that is true”, says Mårten Schultz, Swedish professor of civil law. The report is labeled with the comment
“that it would be counterproductive for the party leader to adduce ethics and
morals”. This case becomes even more interesting if related to the well-known
international events involving Julian Assange and Edward
Snowden that I treat in another article.
Adaptation
to an Evolutionary Changing World
A criticism that is often formulated against religion, not the least with the
example of Galilei vs. the Church, is that it, the religion and the Church,
must adapt continuously or periodically to changes in the human societies,
changes that most often are considered to be development, further equated with
improvement. What should be considered in this context is that religion focuses
on the "nature" of man and so called order
of creation. Even if they are considered to be the
result of natural evolution instead of God's creation, the Earth and associated
life forms result from a process that for the Earth is said to be about
3-4 billions years. Homo sapiens is said to be dated from about 315.000 year ago, beginning to
"exhibit evidence of behavioral modernity around 50.000 years ago".
Focusing upon the Bible, and its dating: the first parts of the Hebrew Bible may be dated from the 8th-7th
centuries BCE being completed through the 6th-4th
centuries, and terminated by the 3rd century BCE up to the 1st century CE. The
New Testament books were composed largely in the second half of the 1st century
CE. The Deuterocanonical books fall largely in between.
[A symptomatic note in parenthesis that refers to the secularism or
multiculturalism implicitly discussed in the present essay of mine. The English
Wikipedia uses the terms BCE and CE or Before Common Era and Common Era,
instead of AD (anno Domini or year of the Lord) and BC (before Christ), explained
as follows: The term "Common Era" can be
found in English as early as 1708, and became more widely used in the
mid-19th century by Jewish academics. In the later 20th century, the use of CE
and BCE was popularized in academic and scientific publications, and more
generally by authors and publishers wishing to emphasize secularism or sensitivity to non-Christians, by
not explicitly referencing Jesus as "Christ" and Dominus ("Lord") through use of
the abbreviation "AD".]
My point then is that the Judeo-Christian as other old
world religions is several thousand of years old and supposedly
adapted to human nature aged of, say hundred thousand years. What is requested
in way of "adaptation" is then an adaptation to a scientific way of
thinking that itself has evolved the last 400 years and is said to be
accelerating its pace of change. Changes of fundamental values have been
requested and have occurred during the last few decades, especially in the
Western world, affecting the structure and functions of family as well the
interactions of men, women, and children, as well as the relations between man
and the environment. In these contexts, "Human Rights"
following an originally murderous French Revolution appear to be considered
substitutes for religion. It is the least to say problematic to conceive
changes in religion in the middle of changes of everything. It is like changing
the political constitution of a nation in the middle of
changing laws and specific changes of rules of governmental activity resulting
from political parties' continuous negotiations. And the rate of change of laws
is also accelerating on the basis of erosion of the concept of natural law in
contrast to positive law and legal positivism. The latter distinguishes especially the
most secularized countries of the world such as Sweden having lately resulted in extreme consequences of questioning the
basic principle of presumption
of innocence. Cf.
the Swedish National Report for the 18th International
Congress on Comparative Law, held in Washington D.C. July-August 2010 on the
impact of religion and challenges for society, law and democracy.
My point is that religion in such context represents the necessary inertia of
society, and should be the most seldom changed institution of society. This
idea is incorporated in the often misunderstood and psychologically broader
concept of dogma. Its importance in intuited by examining for
instance Carl Jung's commentary to the
institution by the Catholic Church of the dogma on the Assumption
of Mary. My own intuition is that this dogma
addressing the importance of womanhood may lie at the heart of problems that
motivated the rise of feminism in predominantly Protestant societies.
Especially after the second world war feminism aiming at the importance of an
undervalued womanhood and motherhood has shaken up the structure and values of
the family. Regarding the meaning of dogma reflecting the long
term stability of the emotional structure of the unconscious psyche Jung
has the following to say (CW 11, p.45, §81, followed by CW 6, p.77 §113 and
p.307 §516, but see also pp.532ff. §806ff.):
For a certain type of intellectual mediocrity characterized by enlightened
rationalism, a scientific theory that simplifies matters is a very good means
of defence [against an onslaught of immediate experience with its
terrible ambiguity] because of the tremendous faith modern man has in anything
which bears the label "scientific". Such a a label sets
your mind at rest immediately [...]. In itself any scientific theory, no matter
how subtle, has, I think, less value from the standpoint of psychological truth
than religious dogma, for the simple reason that a theory is necessarily highly
abstract and exclusively rational, whereas dogma expresses an irrational whole
by means of imagery. This guarantees a far better rendering of an irrational
fact like the psyche. Moreover, dogma owes its continued existence and its form
on the one hand to so-called "revealed" of immediate experiences of
the "Gnosis" - for instance, the Godman, the Cross, the Virgin Birth,
the Immaculate Conception, the Trinity, and so on, and on the other hand to the
ceaseless collaboration of many minds over many centuries. [...] The theory has
to disregard the emotional values of the experience. [...] One scientific
theory is soon superseded by another. Dogma lasts for untold centuries.
Through the shifting of interest from the inner to the outer world our
knowledge of nature was increased a thousandfold in comparison with
earlier ages, but knowledge and experience of the inner world were
correspondingly reduced. The religious interest, which ought normally to be the
greatest and most decisive factor, turned away from the inner world, and the
great figures of dogma dwindled to strange and incomprehensible vestiges, a
prey to every sort of criticism. [...] Modern rationalism is a process of sham
enlightenment and even prides itself morally on its iconoclastic tendencies.
Most people are satisfied with the not very intelligent view that the whole
purpose of dogma is to state a flat impossibility. That it could be the symbolic
expression of a definite idea with a definite content is something that occurs
to hardly anybody. For can one possibly know what that idea is! And what
"I" do not know simply does not exist. Therefore, for this
enlightened stupidity, there is no non-conscious psyche.
Because the contemporary scientific attitude is
exclusively concretistic and empirical, it has no appreciation of the
value of ideas, for facts rank higher than knowledge of the primordial forms in
which the human mind conceives them. This swing towards concretism is a
comparatively recent development, a relict of the Enlightenment. The
results are indeed astonishing, but they have led to an accumulation of
empirical material whose very immensity is productive of more confusion than
clarity. The inevitable outcome is scientific separatism and specialist
mythology, which spells death to universality. The predominance of empiricism
not only means the suppression of active thinking: it also imperils the
building of theories in any branch of science. The dearth of general
viewpoints, however, caters to the construction of mythical theories, just as
much as does the absence of empirical criteria.
I note the above mention of the swing towards concretism, a comparatively
recent development, a relict of the Enlightenment, with astonishing
result, has lead to an accumulation of empirical material whose very
immensity is productive of more confusion than clarity, with scientific
separatism and specialist mythology, which spells death to universality. And
that the predominance of such empiricism not only means the suppression of
active thinking but also imperils the building of theories or generalized
knowledge in any branch of science. I emphasize that this development with a
requirement of endless "facts" also decreases the possibilities of
communication between people who no longer share common basic ideas, not to
mention "common facts" with a selective accessibility to expensive
computerized databases. It increases political polarization and the difficulties
of "debate" that I surveyed in an earlier text.
A type of "information" that is not allowed to be information in
popularly understood philosophy of science is what, in a facile way, is
summarily classified as "speculation" and "introspection". They are considered as ugly words, especially by those, often
engineers, who are committed to the logical
positivism that dominated academia before the
misdirected reaction that led to postmodernism in the eighties. This sort of
classification of information is considered by
the the skilful questioning by West Churchman in his book The
Design of Inquiring Systems (p. 150ff.). He points out
there that philosophically and scientifically "to be a mind is to be
observed". What is speculation for one person can be an observation by
another, and it all becomes a question of "the subjectivity
syndrome". It means that it is truly so that I am not the only one who
best can know what I think and feel. Subjectivity does not need to be only
subjectivity. Subjectivity will not do, because those who stamp out something
as speculation and information are not prone to read and understand
such exposition on observability, in part because of the impossibilities of
"debate" that I considered in my previously mentioned essay on the
subject. And probably they do not care to reflect upon speculation as being the
speculative reason as proposed by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure
Reason that underlies the philosophy of mathematics.
Analogously for introspection, Wikipedia, even disregarding the details adduced
by Churchman, recalls anyway that introspection has been a subject of
philosophical discussion for thousands of years and that the philosopher Plato asked, "[…] why should we not calmly and patiently review our
own thoughts, and thoroughly examine and see what these appearances in us
really are?". And Jung, in the Kantian tradition, discusses the matter in
his Psychological Types as it regards the various possible
relations between object and subject that leads humans to selective blindness.
More directly, the yoga-hype is directly addressed in an essay with the
title Yoga and the West (CW11 with the particularly relevant
title Psychology and Religion: West and East, pp. 529-537),
followed by a couple of other related studies. I only mention this within my
limits of space here, without going into the argumentation, in order to
emphasize that the negation of introspection has had and is having its toll in
the West's increased interest for Eastern meditation techniques, and for the
intuitions of anthroposophy, for that matter. Symptomatically, this neglected
need for some sort of introspection corresponds to the ignored analog Christian prayer and its theoreticians as Pierre-Joseph
de Clorivière (1735-1820) whose book on prayer has been recently translated into a
language of such modest diffusion as Swedish.
To
the gradual impoverishment of self-examination and religious commitment in the
West may be attributed also the misunderstanding of so-called sexuality. For instance, many years
ago one main Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (25 September
1977) announced an article with the title "Pornographic motives on
[Medieval] church walls baffles researchers"
[Porr på kyrkväggar förbryllar forskare]. The title could
better have been "Religious motives in pornographic magazines baffles
researchers." (Cf. Philip Rawson, Tantra, 1973/2012,
fig. 39.) Sexuality can be better seen as religious cult, as suggested by the
intuition that birth of new life presupposes divine intervention. The supposed
speculation on the sexualization of psychology, well described by James Hillman
in his The Myth of Analysis (p. 140ff.)
corresponds to the modern sexualization of religion and to the inability to
introspect our feelings. Hillman writes (p. 143, 147f.), recalling in my
mind my own and Ellen Key's reflections on the "#MeToo"
phenomenology:
Those crucial experiences of psychic
life, eros and suffering and their union, had become, through the
simplistic materialism of the nineteenth, "nothing but" pleasure and
pain, which Bentham might have liked to calibrate with his "felicific
calculus", his fantasy for the mathematical formulation of pleasure and pain.
And the small measure to which these themes had shrunk was yet further reduced:
pleasure was sexual pleasure, and pain was physical pain.[...]
"If Passion mysticism - the mysticism of the cross and its stations, of
the stigmata and the bleeding heart, of the flayed martyrs and the flagellants
- becomes masochism, we have, by naming this after Masoch, turned passion
into pornography. [...] In this case scientific naming did not advance science,
but it degrade the experience [...] Perhaps masochism is a late Victorian
and German expression for religious erotic passion [...] the feminist movement:
a personalized and profaned cry of the soul. The psyche had lost touch
with eros, just as eros, having been excluded from psychology, was
simplified and debased into pornography and sentimentality [...].
And this, contrasting with typically atheistic conceptions (cf.
Google <religious masochism>), is followed by a section of Hillman's book
with the suggestive title that says it all: PSYCHE = MIND: MIND = HEAD. I would
add HEAD = BRAIN. It is obvious that there will be no more space for
speculation and introspection. The brain does not introspect.
Talking about introspection we might as well ask ourselves why and how many if
not all of us can get so innerly touched by some music, being
overwhelmed to the point of tears. It recalls analog but often weaker
experiences of architecture of cathedrals, especially in Gothic architecture. If it is not sheer sentimentality
triggered by references to experiences of lost love or of death it can often be
a question of religious feelings within the range of affects mentioned by Plato
and systematized in the "Doctrine of the Affections". An interesting
testing ground is for instance the famous Lamento d'Arianna (sung here) by Claudio Monteverdi, Lascia
ch'io pianga (sung here) by Georg Friedrich Händel, Henry Purcell' s Dido's
Lament (sung
here) or Tchaikovsky's Hymn of the Cherubim, and in modern times Arvo Pärt's Ode IX
in Kanon Pokjanen, (sung in video
here), presented as having the text of the
"Canon of Repentance to Our Lord Jesus Christ", an Orthodox hymn with a text sung in Church Slavonic and following the tradition of Russian sacred choral music, sung a
cappella. Not to mention J.S. Bach's John's Passion and its theological-musical commentaries, in various degrees of detail. Considering that many
today are sentimentally and ecstatically moved by other types of music recalls
Plato's affirmation that "the modes of music are never disturbed without
unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions." (Rep.
424c).
One important aspect is the relation of this effect of music to its fundamental
nature as related to mathematics I already considered concerning the
intuitions of Jan Brouwer. There are indeed several hypotheses about why and
how we are moved by music, including scientistic hypotheses
on Two types of peak emotional responses to music, (or here, on Melody beyond notes), albeit not why we
are moved to tears. For instance, on September 30th 2018, the
Swedish Radio broadcasted a program in the conversational series Philosophical
Room. It was presented as follows (my English
translation):
Rhythm, timing, swing and groove: What is it that in
sound catches us so, what is it that the pulse wants us to understand?
Rasmus Bååth, Johanna Österling and Guy Madison philosophize.
Some love to dance, others prefer marching in pace. We humans are creators of
meaning, and social creatures. Perhaps the rhythm of music helps us to set us
up in the ranks, to create an order and structure in a fundamentally chaotic
existence.
The value and meaning of rhythm is discussed by Rasmus Bååth, cognition
specialist who researches the chimpanzees’ sense of pace,
Johanna Österling, a rhythm educator as a doctor of music science about
how the body grabs music and how music grabs the body, and Guy Madison, a
professor of psychology who researches rhythm, music, time and timing.
My point, however, leaving aside chimpanzees and more but especially less
relevant speculations such as about Gödel, Escher, and Bach, or about "atonality", it may be fruitful to investigate
why many people are "moved to tears" and why this happens in the
context of classical sacred
music, and typically in certain orthodox choir
music. But compare the above "technical" reference to rythm,
or the technicalities of "Why Dido's Lament breaks our heart every single time", with the problem of understanding the why of so many questions
about rythm in Gregorian chant.
Compare also with so many unsystematic but historically grounded thoughts about
the issue of music in worship, to be contrasted to satanic
rock music and related social effects of rock music (drugs
and sex). There are also many irreligious people if not outright sentimentalist atheists appreciate and can be moved by the atmosphere
of certain churches and cathedrals, especially Gothic cathedrals, attributing
this effect to the power of religious art found there. There is then a motive
for calling the attention upon the fact that instead of following the
Nietzschean suggestion about art, espoused also by previously mentioned Alain
de Botton, one can consider the implications of Theological Aesthetics. as presented for instance by Hans Urs von Balthasar. It recalls the question of The Form
of the Good where
the Good may be equated to God, as well as Plato's
Aesthetics, and paradoxically why many were seduced
by the by now typically Nietzschean idea of art and "beauty" being a
substitute for religion, as pointed out by Gunnela Ivanov in a study on "design" (pp. 303-305).
Not to move into the related quagmire of "Wagner-faddism", that I have considered elsewhere, in an insert in my blog.
The most ambitious work I know about the psychology of music, paying some
attention to its religious aspects is the Swedish
professor Gabrielsson’s Strong Experiences with Music (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011, cf. pp. 172, 161, 172, 184, 455, 484f.). This
is done with the due restraints typical of Sweden known as being the most
secularized country of the world. It means that religious aspects as not
identified as being the most basic, such as implying an ultimate longing for
what humans call gods, God and the Self, reflecting music’s cultural impact
including for instance the discussion of the “Mozart
effect”, or more generally the significance of music education.
The author of an article in Scientific American (August 14, 2021)
with the ambitious title of "What God, Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness have in Common" explains that his main objection to the
religious Christian explanation of reality is the
problem of evil. He writes that a
casual glance at human history, and at the world today, reveals enormous
suffering and injustice. He writes and then concludes his article with:
If the problem of evil prevents me
from believing in a loving God, then the problem
of beauty keeps me from
being an atheist like [the theoretical physicist Steven] Weinberg. Hence,
agnosticism…
"I’m definitely a skeptic. I
doubt we’ll ever know whether God exists, what quantum mechanics means, how
matter makes mind. These three puzzles, I suspect, are different aspects of
a single, impenetrable mystery at the
heart of things.
But one of the pleasures of agnosticism - perhaps the greatest pleasures - is
that I can keep looking for answers and hoping that a revelation awaits just over the horizon."
The for me appalling superficiality of the article directed to the American and
Anglo-Saxon scientifically educated community appears already in its beginning.
The author does not seem to know the discussion of theodicy and does not take
in account the philosopher Kant's treatment of beauty that I consider in another essay. He does not ask himself wherefrom come the clear intuition, feeling or
empathy for suffering and injustice (not to mention beauty), and the perception
of injustice with the conception of what justice is. The more so considering
that since immemorial times humanity itself, to which he belongs, has been
committing - (and why?) - injustices and has been causing sufferings, all
disregarding "natural" physical causes. In conversations with
atheists and now agnostics I have experienced that they usually rely on a sort
of logical tautology based on universal
Darwinism: whatever "puzzling" belief and
behavior humans display, such as the appreciation of beauty or empathy, it must
has emerged and affirmed itself because of its efficacy for survival. The great
pleasure of agnosticism is then to wait for understanding the details,
"hoping that a revelation awaits just over the horizon": obviously
any revelation except Revelation.
A necessary main reflection concerns the issue of Theodicy or, as Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it, an explanation of why a perfectly good, almighty, and
all-knowing God permits evil. In Western culture this has been historically
represented by the Bible's Book
of Job, giving
rise to a whole literature including Carl Jung's book Answer
to Job. It
is a main example of the disputable relation of Jung to Christian
doctrine, surveyed by James W. Heisig in his "Jung and theology:
A bibliographic essay" (442 references, in Spring, 1973, pp. 204-255, but see also pp. 188-203).
It invites the reader to think and to further study Jung's interpretation of
the essence of Protestantism and Catholicism, which influenced him, and how it
did it. - Popular atheists' position is generally to solve these questions by
simply ignoring the history and content of Theodicy. Popular Christians' way,
as in the catechization of children, is to refer to this summarily by
denominating it as a mystery. The Catholic
Encyclopedia exposes Theodicy in all its
complexity as evidenced by the richness of links in its text, reminding of
common objections to my own texts, motivating occasionally lazy or
disinterested readers to follow the patterns described in my essay on Debate:
requiring that the author furnishes them with an "executive summary"
of what he wants to say in a maximum of about ten lines.
The immense complexity of the question comes from the definition of Theodicy as
"the justification of God" that we may put in contrast to the earlier
mentioned human "Ego inflation". And this is incidentally illustrated
in the video of Jordan Peterson talking about The
reason modern people can't see God is that they won't look low enough. In this present text I will only mention
one modest reflective question of mine: "wherefrom" comes our own
intuition of "justice" and of "evil", which in turn
requires us to ask for a justification of the apparent ungodly evil injustice
in the causation of death, pain and sorrow? To which extent are sufferings not
self-inflicted, caused directly of indirectly by humans' disrespect
of other people, of nature and of the "order of creation"?. It
is to be seen as a pun that the rather atheistic magazine The Economist observes that in understanding the
universe and the order of creation "Even Stephen Hawking doesn't quite
manage to explain why we are here."
And, ultimately, what to say about suffering? The Stoics had a lot of meaningful things to
say about it, but many of today's atheists regress and use to console
themselves in imagining that their relatives' and their own death and
decomposed bodies will fertilize the earth for future generations of
vegetation, humans and animals. All major Indian religions refer to
reincarnation. All religions refer to an afterlife. Differences among religions do not matter in this context as long as
we can accept the Veda saying that "God is one but the
learned call him by many names",
while the sheer number of different world religions testify to the universal
importance of their origins. This does not prevent that some religion can have
approached (true) God better than others, or "best". In religion many
find relief for the suffering that atheists use for denying religion, based on
their claim that it is inconsistent with their understanding of the goodness of
God. The Catholic Church in particular refers also to the Pope's Apostolic
Letter Salvifici Doloris [Saving Passion] on the theme of suffering, a letter that has no
atheistic analogs. Some comments on this Catholic approach, may
always be misunderstood and perceived as controversial.
The theme of suffering, in particular the passion of Jesus is perceived to be
difficult to understand. The only popular theological "explanation" I
have seen and understood is to be found in an essay
by SørenUlrik Thomsen, influenced by the theologically
controversial René
Girard, addressing political correctness
in (Danish original) Stjernvelt, F. & Thomsen, S.U. Kritik af den negative
opbyggelighed (Borgen/Vindrose, 2005, my translation from the
Swedish version Kritik av den negativa uppbyggligheten [Criticism of the
negative edification], 2007, p.166, 263):
In summary, my defense for Christianity is that in my eyes it is a
civilized and civilizing religion, partly because it invites man to believe in
God, so that he does not make himself god or worships others as if they
were God , and partly because it encourages believing in Christ, thus
preventing that man both plays victim and that he turns others into scapegoats.
Since Christ is the Son of God, He is the final victim, and because he has
taken on all our sins, he is the ideal scapegoat: Christ is the crucial
historical event that makes the sacrifice of sons become meaningless. Because
Christ's sacrifice can never be exceeded, it has redeemed all. Thus, it has
become possible for the person who believes that he will be forgiven to take on
his own sin instead of projecting it on scapegoats, in which one should rather
see Christ's suffering than the evil of the riffraff. All of these are only
negative arguments for Christianity as a kind of hygienic institution that will
tame people both to refrain from megalomania and from tyranny over others by
posing as victim (often two sides of the same), and prevent the community from
returning to the deification of leaders and ethnic cleansing. As long as you
speak in the sensible spirit of public opinion exchange, negative arguments are
the only valid ones. I cannot invoke my position as believer because faith is a
mystery. But I can tell about it.
As a challenging parenthetical curiosity about the "negative
arguments" mentioned above, it may be the case that they mean the same as
what Didier Julia, French translator of J.G. Fichte's Theory of
Science [Grundlage der Wissenschaftlehre], mentions in the
preface to La théorie de la science: exposé de 1804:
"la réflexion philosophique n'est qu'une théologie négative de l'absolu"
[philosophical reflection is only a negative theology of the absolute].
Also related to the Theodicy is the apparently simpler question of why God
should allow people to be born despite of knowing that their lives will
be be marked by much suffering, notwithstanding also by some joy.
Many people's life is undoubtedly characterized mostly if not only by extreme suffering.
To this I will contrapose the case of humans: why do parents wish to give birth
to children, beyond the pleasure of sexual satisfaction and the need for help
and support in their old age. One if not the only naive and patently true
answer is that humans enjoy in engendering and have children who also help the
parents' psychic development. The children's parents, after a basic education
to adulthood, want to leave them on their own free will and and to
the risk of own wrong decisions that may lead to unhappy lives just as God is
supposed to have respectfully done with us, instead of making us His marionettes in a "perfect world". The children were supposed to be
the result and living symbol of a tie of love between man and
woman, all this despite the corruptions implied by abortions and divorces. Why
should this not also be a simplified answer to the why a Christianly understood
God, who theologically is love, should wish us to be born? For the rest, the question
is what do we want: paradise on earth, no suffering and no death disregarding
what follows for eternity from and after them? Disregarding or deriding death
and the world literature's great classics such as The
Tibetan Book of the Dead together with
the commentaries about it and its
connection to otherwise popular meditative practices and Christian conceptions to death
in the Middle Ages or mourning period? Do we want to be immortal hedonistic and
wise gods we ourselves, as the wisest AI-gadgets or God-substitutes we hope
for?
This serious question is best illustrated and answered by my choice out of the
Wikipedia's list of films featuring surveillance: The
Truman Show (1998).
The "theodicy" of the film's gods impersonated by the director,
producer, and writer of the plot may help to resolve the philosophical battle
on Leibniz's famous claim that "the actual world is the best of all possible worlds", and is the following:
"Truman Burbank, adopted and raised
by a corporation inside a simulated television show revolving around
his life, until he discovers it and decides to escape.[...] Truman
Burbank is the unsuspecting star of The Truman Show, a reality
television program which is broadcast live around the clock and across the
globe. His entire life has taken place within a giant arcological dome
in Hollywood, fashioned to create the seaside town of Seahaven Island, and
equipped with thousands of cameras to monitor all aspects of his life."
A greater vision of this issue of God as a supreme "helicopter
parent" is provided by
Hans Urs von Balthasar in his Theology of History (p. 61), recalling
at the same time the shortcomings of logic in relation to Gödel's incompleteness theorems and
my paper on computers as embodied logic and mathematics:
Man's freedom and choice are not infringed by the freedom of God, who [...]
provides what is done by man with a scale of reference on the divine plane; any
more than the "play within the play" in Hamlet is deprived of its
dramatic character because Hamlet and the court are watching and interpret it
in terms of the events of their world. True, Hamlet is responsible for devising
the play within the play and seeing that it is acted, so that the reason and
purpose of the minor tragedy lie in the major one.
The same von Balthasar recalls (p. 44) the question of love and that
"Knowledge is always totally measured by love". Nowadays, however,
the loss of religious feelings imply the loss of this meaning of love
and life in freedom, leaving sex as the only meaning, countered by
"mistake of loving the wrong person" because of the lure of the
sexual instinct, where love is again equated to horny arousal and is separated
from its Christian complement of Justice. This is also what allows to talk
about sexual love such as in LGBT-contexts where any sexual behavior is
justified by the fact that it is a sort of sacred or sacralized love coupled to
gratuitous forgiveness by a kind Jesus who is only love, further equated to a
sort of feel-good kindness. Forget justice, the Bible and the Ten
Commandments whose infringement may be causing most social troubles, human
tragedies and suffering, while keeping at least four or five of them would
improve the world approaching paradise on earth. They are the tragedies that
are supposed to be the subject of the literature and art that today are
substitutes for the Bible: novels, romances, films, and ad-hoc self-help books
that are supposed to perform catharsis of sick souls.
Paganism, atheism and the future of our youth
The United Nations define youth as persons between the ages of 15 and 24. When
children are not educated in an established religion, and particularly
Christianism, this is often justified as the parents refraining from
indoctrinating them, and waiting for their own later capability to make
informed choices by themselves. It is not explained what bases and criteria can
and should be followed in the process of choice. There is no base of common ideas
and values usually furnished by religion. The available knowledge is only
ordinary elementary logic and what happens to have been taught in school and in
the Internet.
In order to illustrate the problem of the proposed
educational procedure I will report a case that I happen to know in detail, of
a Swedish child who was not religiously educated until he progressively
educated himself in contact with other youngsters and with the Internet. An
adult friend of the family tried to understand him in his early twenties,
sensing the younger's attraction to something related to the New Age. The youngster expressed very early artistic
interests such as for live action role-playing game - LARP concerned with dramatic or artistic expression , and later for activities such as Burning man, or local analogs like The
borderland, for occultism taught
at the university in the discipline of history of religions, for
thoughts related to Aleister Crowley (influenced by
William Blake) with his Thelema, the
music group Current
93, and 93 Thelema, where Thelema is described as "esoteric and
occult social or spiritual philosophy and religious movement", and further for David Tibet's
art and music, experienced by the young man as
"messing
chant about different visionary notions of the apocalypse from a Gnostic
perspective with lyrics usually based on various historical lyrics mixed with
the singer's own life, for me personally, this music resonates with me on an
incredibly strong level and has led me to want to get a deeper understanding of
the references in the lyrics.".
Compare with the earlier section above on intuition in music and its
reference to the book on Strong experiences with music. All this besides the problem of evaluation within the
range of religious
music where the neo-pagan music in
one of the alternatives, besides, say, Gregorian and Ambrosian
chant. In order to avoid confusion and deception somebody advised further our
young man to adhere (i.e. regress) basically to paganism as represented by the Old Norse
religion and Edda, and apparent
outgrowths such as the privately distributed text (in Swedish, in pdf-format),
obtained via the privately secretive network cdn.fbsbx.com,
with the title of Handhavandemål, a
denomination that is obviously akin to the Edda-poem Hávamál.
"Strong experiences with music" awaken some
interest for much of what Plato expresses about music in Republic IV (424b-c, trans. P. Shorey) and Timaeus (47c-e, trans.
B.Jowett):
…be
watchful against its [the state's] insensible corruption…be watchful against
innovations in music… counter to the established order, and to the best of
their power guard against them, fearing when anyone says that the song is most
regarded among men "which hovers newest on the singer's lips" lest
haply it be supposed that the poet means not new songs but a new way of song
and is commending this. But we must not praise that sort of thing nor conceive
it to be the poet's meaning. For a change to a new type of music is something
to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes. For the modes of music are never
disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social
conventions…
Moreover,
so much of music as is adapted to the sound of the voice and to the sense of
hearing is granted to us for the sake of harmony. And harmony which has motions
akin to the revolutions of our souls, is not regarded by the intelligent votary
of the Muses as given to them with a view to irrational pleasure, which is
deemed to be the purpose of it in our day, but as meant to correct any discord
which may have arisen in the courses of the soul, and to be our ally in
bringing her into harmony and agreement with herself, and rhythm too was given
to them for the same reason, on account of the irregular and graceless ways
which prevail among mankind generally, and to help us against them.
The question is then how to relate all this to
Christianity and Catholicism and explain it didactically to the young man,
relating it to the definition
of Thelema, and considering that it deals with
archetypal stuff that is mentally stimulating, but dangerous as related to modern
Satanism. How to explain that certain updated and attended New Age initiatives such as Burning Man can
be seen as religious-satanic enactments that correspond to and substitute
Christian processions and ritual celebrations. They may also be dangerous as recreational
drugs could be in context
of the New Age. I can imagine that somebody like Carl Jung
could have explained this, as psychologists see him explaining
William Blake to whom he refers in six of the volumes in his Collected Works. Jung explained
the reason of why the psyche of artists lies dangerously close to the
collective unconscious and the difference between artistry and insanity is just
a question of keeping on the right side of the demarcation line (Collected Works, vol. 15, The Spirit in man, art, and literature,
§209f. p.137f.) I myself have tried to understand a possibly analog case of
another youngster who had recently converted to veganism and tried to convince me to do the same. It was mentally
exhausting requiring several days of close communication, leading eventually
only to my documenting the issue in an insert
in my blog, reviving intuitions I had when commenting the Wagner-cult
in another
blog-insert.
I must complete the example of the “young man” to
which I have dedicated the whole above text of this chapter with another example
of a Swedish child who was not religiously educated until he progressively
educated himself in contact with other youngsters at school and with the
Internet. An elder, friend of the family tried to understand him in his early
twenties, sensing the younger's attraction to veganism and
economics, eventually earning a master
of business administration MBA. Already at the beginning of his
MBA-studies the friend gave the young man some suggestions of literature that
could raise consciousness about philosophical and ethical aspects of the usual
reliance of MBA-economics upon utilitarianism. It
turned out that such suggestions were give too early because, of course, most
youngsters need to concentrate their initial academic studies on just studying
the given literature and passing the exams. After getting the MBA, however, the
critical suggestions that were given too early proved to have been given too
late. The young man who proved to be a brilliant student had already been
offered employment at one of the Big Four accounting firms and had already learnt about the
possibility to study ethical aspects in the perspective of effective altruism. Wikipedia shows how this relates to religion when
stating that effective altruism can also be in tension with religion
insofar as religion emphasizes spending resources on worship and evangelism
instead of causes that do more good. I know that embarking on a discussion with the youngster
about these issues, related as they are to also distributism becomes a practical
impossibility, as it was already
experienced in the case of veganism. The discussion would end into the kind of
unending arguments displayed in Seattle
Catholic (John Sharpe, 3 Nov 2002) about “Liberal Economics vs. Catholic Truth”, to be compared with what has gone in the field of
welfare economics, as represented by Nobel prize laureate Amartya
Sen. While modern western
society offers an ongoing industrial production of profane academic research
and stuff that try to justify the irrelevance of religion, Jesus Christ never
meant that ordinarily gifted and educated good citizens should embark on such
discussions. They include whether altruism can also be explained by biology
and evolution, and whether such
explanation constitutes a tautology. The whole question
illustrates the meaning of a cultural crisis and tragedy. A tragedy of ignoring
the place of religion in the mutual understanding between humans, can already
be seen to have led to e.g. Marxism vs. Nazism and their heritage in
contributing to the eruption of the second world, the conflict between
Russia and Ukraine, and numerous other conflict
in the world, including the 2023
Israel-Hamas war.
It is a moral and social responsibility to maintain a
communication with younger generations on these matters. Already from the
beginning, the attraction to New Age and neo-paganism - a regression of
1000-2000 years in the religious development of the West - has been apparent in
a decreasing
commitment to Christianity in the cultural leadership of the United States
after the second world war. The more so in Sweden, often considered as the most
secularized country of the world, even if not easily identifiable as such in
the worldwide
statistics. Philosophically it can be seen as pre-announced by F.
Nietzsche, and its wise
interpretations.
But I believe
that such communication with younger generations is becoming gradually more
difficult if not outright impossible, in part for the same reasons that I
suggested that debate is impossible on
these matters, as already noted in the study of the foundations of mathematics.
As I quote
from Jan Brouwer's Life, art and
mysticism :
[R]idiculous is the use of language when
one tries to express subtle nuances of will which are not part of the living
reality of those concerned, when for example so-called philosophers or
metaphysicians discuss among themselves morality, God, consciousness,
immortality, or the free will. These people do not even love each other, let
alone share the same subtle movements of the soul; sometimes they even do not
know each other personally. They either talk at cross-purposes or each builds
his own little logical system which lacks any connection with reality. For
logic is life in the human brain; it may accompany life outside the brain but
it can never guide it by virtue of its own power. Indeed, if there is a harmony
of will, logic may well fall by the wayside ...
Alternatives to
this conclusion is to revert to Pascal's famous distinction mentioned in the
introduction above between the two types of Esprit as adduced in the context of brain
physiology, or to
analytical type psychology that I consider in the
context of debate. Or to follow the concluding reflections about debate, and here below.
Concluding Reflections on the Reflections
An objection that can be directed against this essay is that it appears to rely
often upon to references to the work and the authority of authors such as
Churchman and Jung (not to mention Jesus Christ in the Bible) that
some readers may not know and feel not to be able to check and consult. This
reminds me of the modern phenomenon intuitively summarized by the title of
books like Society without the Father and
The Sibling Society portraying the
breakdown of parental authority and influence. The point is that all humans
have a story of being influenced at least initially in their lives by some
people more than others, while Steven Shapin remarks in his Social
History of Science that all science relies on the trustworthiness of
others. In the family all children are usually influenced mostly by their
father and mother, to the point that in many schools of psychology including
psychoanalysis the importance of such influence reaches mythical proportions.
Many cultures have cruel and denigrating epithets for those who claim that they
have unknown father, or too many "fathers", or a mother of dubious
morality. Even in their further development, humans develop by comparing,
rejecting or expanding their parents' teachings within society at large.
Children's later social life including the academia displays analogous
properties. The alternative is supposedly ego-inflated self-sufficiency. In
practice it implies sheer eclecticism or perspectivism developing into
postmodernism, post-structuralism or sheer relativism, where the fundamental
philosophical and theological premises are often ignored, undermining the
conclusions and the possibility of criticism. An example of this is the late
re-launching of "transrationality" in a rhetorically kpowerful video on What
is God by a self-defined "life-coach" relating to thoughts akin to transpersonal
psychology. He appears to me as displaying traits of
(young adult) child
prodigy or indigo
children having, nevertheless, a few
important things to say about the complexity of the question of "existence
of God", including anthropomorphism as considered above.
There is in circulation a lot of easy popular criticism of religion. An example
is to claim that many historically calamities and wars have been caused by the
struggle for or against a particular religion, starting typically with the
Christian crusades. Even disregarding necessarily apologetic books like The Real History of the Crusades that,
for instance, explain why they are regarded as apologetic: they point out that
crusades (together with the Inquisition) are "quite possibly the most
misunderstood event in European history" and that "most of what
passes for public knowledge about it is either misleading of just plain
wrong". There is still more to it. I usually respond in my mind that
neither the first nor second world war are usually claimed to have been caused
by the clash of religious convictions. Similarly the famous
calamitous dictatorships like Hitler's, Stalin's or Mao Zedong's have not been
associated with any religions except the "religion of atheism". The objection that atheism is not a religion
because it lacks a belief in the supernatural is undermined by confusion about
what belief is, e.g. as contrasted to faith (see above on faith and belief) and
about what natural is, considering that reason as related to intelligence is
claimed today to be superseded by super-intelligent machines.
And it is noted that atheists have
an active belief system with views concerning origins: that the universe and
life arose by natural processes starting with a ludicrous “Big Bang” containing the presuppositions of evolution.
A most sophisticated and less visible criticism of Christianity is offered by
anthroposophy. In what he calls "spiritual science" Rudolf Steiner elaborates and interprets Christ
as being "the center of earthly evolution".
In its intellectual complexity such interpretation hides a reliance upon an
extreme intellectualization or rather rationalization of Christianity in the
German cultural sphere as represented by the writer and statesman J.W.Goethe (see an excerpt of a study by Walter Naumann) as well as by the
theologian and philosopher F. Schleiermacher. A
study of the one main book by Steiner, A Philosophy of Freedom, strongly recommended
to me by a Steiner enthusiast who confessed never having heard about
Schleiermacher, indicates to me that it is a heavy idiosyncratic construction
based on convolute interpretations of various contemporaneous philosophical,
quasi-philosophical and psychological terms such as intellect, thought, feeling
and intuition. The term intellectualization itself that I use here requires a
similar grounding. These terms appear undefined and undiscussed if compared
with their elaboration in Jung's work (esp. vol. 6 on Psychological Types). It
all becomes a temptation to distance oneself from Christianity by
reinterpreting and turning it into an alternative neo-religion despite
assurances that such anthroposophy is not a religion (despite of having some
historical roots in theosophy.) It turns out to be a spiritual science for the
few who feel tempted to over-intellectualize thanks to their being analytically
gifted. Alternatively for those who superficially look for pretexts
to avoid explicit religious commitment, since then there is neither
"sin" nor punishment.
Paradoxically over-intellectualization can turn into a criticism of
atheism without any religious commitments, as in an essay by the prominent
Brazilian anthroposopher and computer scientist Valdemar Setzer who
deconstructs Richard Dawkins' atheistic arguments in a monumental review
of The God Delusion. The absurdity of such
a toilsome attempt becomes patent if one considers that the are other too many
books that would require similar reviews. To name just two: Reason and Religious Belief, and How Jesus became God, and I know of people who pass their lives trying to read them all,
testifying unconsciously that ultimately it is really a question of faith more
than of debates that have gone on for at least two-three thousand years.
Unfortunately such "debates" meet the difficulties and
impossibilities that I thoroughly consider in my article on Information
as Debate, while in the case of religion and theology
it only paradoxically increases the popularity and prestige of Dawkins as
measured in a citation index. The problems of such intellectualization can be
illustrated from the edition of the Philosophy of Freedom, considered to be
"the fundamental philosophical work of
the philosopher and esotericist Rudolf
Steiner" with its main title translated once as Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path (1995,
p. 148, 171, original italics):
A moral action "presupposes the capacity for moral intuitions. Whoever
lacks the capacity to experience the particular ethical principle of each
individual case will also never achieve truly individual willing"...
"For those who understand how ideas are intuitively experienced as a kind
of self-sufficient essence, it is clear that, when we cognize in
the world of ideas, we live our way into something that is the same for all
human beings; but that, when we borrow intuitions from that world of ideas for
our acts of will, we individualize an element of the world through the
same activity that we develop in the spiritual-conceptual process of
cognition as something universally human."
I cannot refrain from comparing these and related sentences in the book with
what Nicolas Berdyaev writes on freedom in his Dostoievsky: An Interpretation, (chap. 3, pp. 67-88), which I recommend for finding it more
comprehensible and related to the matter in the present text, as well as to
politics. Steiner's book is embedded in discutable and rather
bombastic language of loose concepts of intuition, cognition, thought, feeling,
spirit and spiritual world, etc. as well as in "para-Christian"
speculations and "para-Christian" dogmas. For instance at
the second paragraph of his review of The God Delusion, Setzer writes (my emphasis
in italics):
I am not a materialist, but I do not belong to any organized religion
either. I admit, as a working hypothesis, that
there are non-physical processes in the universe and in all living beings, that
is, processes that cannot be reduced to physical ones. In fact, I
consider every physical process a manifestation of a non-physical one.
Having this spiritualist, monist point of view, I
cannot belong to any religion because practically all of them are dogmatic,
require faith or belief. Furthermore, they usually have rituals, and I don’t
need or practice any. [...]
I stress that my position is to have working hypotheses, and not
dogmas, faith or beliefs. Furthermore, religions are in general directed
to feelings. I look for understanding through inner and
outer observation, studying and reasoning. [...]
So, in summary, after referring further to his worldview, Setzer admits
it as a working hypothesis, as if “admitting” were
not the same as “uncommitted believing”, and dogmas could not be considered to
be millenary or centenary working hypotheses. And he considers processes
from a spiritualist monist point of view. This he does as if
"considering" were not uncommitted believing in a problematic
"spirit" and "reasoning studies" of "inner
observations" (introspection) but not in undefined "feelings",
and as if organized religions could not be considered as points of view,
whatever that means if non-Nietzschean views. Finally, he believes that
he does not need faith or belief, despite of having just stated his uncommitted
faith or beliefs. So, the main point seems to be to avoid commitment, i.e. to
implicitly join skepticism. As in a marriage ceremony wishing to delete "Till
Death Do Us Part" as a preparation for divorce. Or as in a
religious persecution, to avoid martyrdom for a "dogmatic faith", as
many Germans must have done during the Holocaust that followed the spiritual
influence of Goethe, Schleiermacher and Steiner.
When reading references to "spirit", for instance, I always am
reminded of my absurd tour de force in trying to make meaning of my study of a
book by Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, (translation
from the French original, 1987/1989) in order to compare it with Steiner's (also here). But keeping to the above quotations from the Philosophy of
Freedom: what to do about e.g. the above citations, how to develop the
capacity to experience, or of understanding, or of that to do when it is not
clear? Or, when on the basis of the Philosophy of anthroposophers preach
that people "should" or "must", as the so called
Kantian categorical
imperative does: who cares, and how many people
care about Kant or, still less, about Steiner when they do not care about the
immensely more influential Jesus Christ, Buddha, Muhammad or Confucius? Only
if if a particular analytical gift for logic allows the atheist to
construct a provisory logical fact net that is felt to be an (undefined)
"argument", as evidenced by Churchman in his "Leibnizian
inquiring systems", and is exemplified by the previously mentioned
Setzer's review of the book The God Delusion. Churchman's
expression "Leibnizian inquiring systems" is in honor of
the intellectual giant Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), a pioneer of
(among other fields) logic who is said to have tried to develop a logical
language, Mathesis universalis, in order to prevent human misunderstandings
that lead to tragic wars such as the Thirty
Years' War. (Refer to the present claims for man's
understanding of the riddles of the universe and the need for a
"super-intelligence".)
Steiner's argumentative reconstruction of parts of the Western cultural
heritage on the basis of spirit and intuition, allowed
and allows advanced criticism of atheistic tenets. Such tenets,
however, are expressed under the claim, reiterated by Setzer, that it is not
necessary to join or follow "organized religions" or any
"Church". I read in an e-mail (September 12, 2022): “I believe in
nothing” immediately corrected to “…sorry, in truth [actually, my trans.], I
have a belief: I believe that I believe
in nothing”. All this can be related to the earlier item on To Believe and to Know (above). Nevertheless, in
doing so the critic does not perceive that what is followed is an undefined and
misunderstood "organized thinking", falling into the pitfalls that I
considered in my essay on Information
as Debate. Some
help to organize our thoughts is to be obtained from Jung's repeated references
to anthroposophy, such as (CW 10, p.83f. §169f.):
The spiritual currents of our time have, in fact, a deep affinity with
Gnosticism. [...] The most impressive movement numerically is undoubtedly
Theosophy, together with its continental sister, Anthroposophy; these are pure Gnosticism
in Hindu dress.[...] The passionate interest in these movements
undoubtedly arises from psychic energy which can no longer be invested in
obsolete religious forms. For this reason such movements have a
genuinely religious character, even when they pretend to be scientific. It
changes nothing when Rudolf Steiner calls his Anthroposophy "spiritual
science", or when Mrs. Eddy invents a "Christian Science." These
attempts at concealment merely show that religion has grown suspect - almost as
suspect as politics and world-reform.
All this problematizes religion itself but also refers us back to the earlier
mentioned Pascal in his Pensées, on the intelligibility of the Christian
religion: "Une religion purement intellectuelle serait plus proportionnée aux
habiles; mais elle ne servirait pas au peuple. La seule religion chrètienne
estproportionnée à tous..." (1949/1955, p. 161, §251 - "A purely
intellectual religion would be more adequate to the skillful; but it would
not serve the people. Only the Christian religion is adequate to all
...").
This insight was already expressed by Thomas Aquinas as noted by the political
philosopher Eric Voegelin
in his Autobiographical Reflections (chap.
24). Nevertheless Voegelin confesses that he does not
know of any Christian thinker who ever discussed how this is possible
(a religion adequate to all). I find that Jung's analytic psychology addresses
and explains why and how this is possible. Voegelin, however, reveals that
he himself has not read Jung, relying as he does on a doubtful authority of
Henri Charles Pueh and Hedda Herwigs (chap. 17 and 21) in order to erroneously classifying and
summarily condemning Jung as a gnostic. Therefore Voegelin writes
inconsequentially (chap. 24) adducing and rightly condemning the failure of
"existentialism", observing that originally existentialist Karl
Jasper noted it and was forced to abandon
"the language of existential order" in order to return to the
"language of reason" (Vernunft). The latter is in my view what
the ignored analytic psychology purports to solve. Voegelin also
seems to reveal a theological naivity when he in
his high-flown bombastic language vainly searches for "what is the
specific content of the Christian pneumatic differentiation, which transcends
the noetic differentiations of Plato and Aristotle. This task was never done;
the problem is hidden in the language of natural reason and of
revelation." (My retranslation from the Portuguese translation, p. 161.)
Voegelin is interesting because he seems to offer an irreligious approach
that beyond Eastern forms of Buddhism and "transrationality" is an
(or the only?) alternative to the Steiner-anthroposophical one. In chapter 14
about ideology, in the aforementioned book, he reveals a surprising shallowness
when he attributes the evil (exemplified by Nazism and Marxism)
of apparently intelligent persons to "intellectual dishonesty",
"alienation", and incompatibility with "science" in its
"rational sense of critical analysis". Unethical murderous behavior
is said to be caused by the game of conquering a pseudo-identity by affirming
one's power as a substitute for the lost "human ego". The failure of
Hegel (and I would mention Heidegger, both already condemned by Carl Jung) is
based on wrong premises decurring from refusing to
discuss the etiological argument of Aristotle, "that
man's existence does not come from himself but the divine plan of
reality". And Voegelin affirms this reference to divinity after
assuring that he has neither ideological nor religious allegiances,
lamenting only the influence of the "cultural degradation of the academic
and intellectual universe." All this motivates the present text of mine.
I will not complicate matters by adducing, I only mention it, that Pascal's
most famous and discussed intellectual argument against atheism, based on the
concept of probability: the Pascal's
Wager to which I refer readers: "Pascal
argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to
believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a
finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas they stand to receive
infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite
losses (eternity in Hell)." (The criticism directed against this argument,
that it deals only with "feigned faith", deserves also careful
critical attention for an understanding of what faith is.)
Besides the question of whether a religion is adequate to "all" there
is the question of whether discussions or "debate" about religion and
theology is adequate to all. The latter I do not believe is
possible, as the reader may already have felt in the reading of many of the
paragraphs above, as well will feel in the two paragraphs below this one.
Neither Jesus Christ nor other central figures of other world
religions believed that people can and want to start theological
disputations. On the contrary, I think that that a great true religion must
rely on a language of "revelation" that happens to speak to human
heart and reason as myth and ritual do, because of its universal truth, perhaps
apprehended by a few apostles but subsequently obvious to many if not all. It
has little to do with undefinable "intelligence", and follows in part
from my already mentioned article on Information as Debate, a
debate that subsequently may require "apostolic" intellectualization.
The one and only historical figure that I know, who most earnestly tried to
approach the integration between Christian religion and philosophy in a sort of
theistic philosophy is the earlier mentioned
Franz
Xaver von Baader (1765-1841). About him the Catholic Encyclopedia affirms “Baader's system
surpasses both in depth and in breadth all the other philosophies of his time”, that is including Immanuel Kant’s.
By the way, Baader can only be retrieved in Wikipedia by
means of his whole name.
It is interesting to note a quite neglected message
in the Bible about this, in the Ecclesiasticus/Sirach
chapters 38:24ff. up to 39:1-11 (edited by me here for our modern "democratic" style). It
contrasts so called intellectual vs. manual work, where manual can be
understood in our modern times as material work or dealing
with the material world in engineering, challenging the idea that
such considerations that in part were respected in the foundations of
universities about 1000 years ago, should, as religions, be updated and adapted
to modern times. Here it comes in a slightly edited form for the purposes of a
minimum of political correctness to be balanced against a necessary modesty and
some opposite views that can be read in the Ecclesiastes' excerpts
in my Research Summary, year 2012) and in Sirach 38:24 ff.:
38:24 Scholars must have time to study if they are going to be wise; they
must be relieved of other responsibilities. 25-27 How can a farm[er] gain
knowledge when his [...] ambition is to drive the oxen and make them work [...]
It is the same with the artist and the craftsman, who work night and day
engraving precious stones, carefully working out new designs. They take great
pains to produce a lifelike image, and will work far into the night to finish
the work. It is the same with the blacksmith at his anvil, planning what
he will make from a piece of iron [...] 29 It is the same with the potter,
sitting at his wheel and turning it with his feet, always concentrating on his
work, concerned with how many objects he can produce [...] 31 All of these
people are skilled with their hands, each of them an expert at his own
craft. 32 Without such people there could be no cities; no one would
live or visit where these services were not available. 33 These
people are not sought out to serve on the public councils... They do not serve
as judges, and they do not understand legal matters [...] 34 But the work
they do holds this world together. When they do their work, it is the same as
offering prayer.
39:1 But it is different with the person who devotes himself to studying the
Law of the Most High. He examines the wisdom of all the ancient writers
[...] 2 He memorizes the sayings of famous men and is a skilled
interpreter of parables. 3 He studies the hidden meaning of proverbs
and is able to discuss the obscure points of parables. 4 Great people
call on him for his services, and he is seen in the company of rulers. He
travels to foreign lands in his efforts to learn about human good and evil.
5 It is his practice to get up early and pray aloud to the Lord his
Creator, asking the Most High to forgive his sins. 6 Then,
if the great Lord is willing, he will be filled with understanding. He will
pour out a stream of wise sayings, and give thanks to the Lord in
prayer. 7 He will have knowledge to share and good advice to give, as
well as insight into the Lord's secrets. 8 He will demonstrate his
learning in what he teaches, and his pride will be in the Lord's Law and
covenant. 9 He will be widely praised for his wisdom, and it will
never be lost, because people for generations to come will remember him. 10 The
Gentiles will talk about his wisdom, and he will be praised aloud in the
assembly. 11 If he lives to old age, he will die famous, but if he is
laid to rest before he is famous, he will be content.
This exposition is to be compared with the ennoblement of manual
work that characterizes the Marxist
conceptualization of work in order to verify whether there are some motives for
the development and application of technology for automation in general and
computerization. The question has been object of extense theorizing
as exemplified by Giulio Angioni's book (in Italian) Il Sapere
della mano: Saggi di Antropologia del lavoro [The hand's knowledge: Essays on the Anthropology of Work,
review in Italian here], and has been also object
of Marxistic theorizing in the field of informatics under the title
of Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts. There it was a question of relinquishing
talk about "systems" in favor of emphasis on "design"
trying a supposed ennoblement of manual work by or for enthusiastic acceptance
of capitalistically driven higher technology. I find that in my earlier work I
showed that there are many controversial intellectual, political, and
religious implications that are related to the drive towards
technology and automation, and further to artificial intelligence - AI, as
suggested for older technology in some essays in Carl Mitcham & Jim Grote
(eds.) Theology and Technology and in Mitcham's "Religion and Technology" in J.K. Berg
Olsen et al. (eds.) in A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology.
Conclusion? It is not a question of thinking elite versus working proletariat,
it is rather of a call to modesty in debates, the more so when matters get
gradually more complicated because tasks were expected to become more simple
and automated with a technology that strives mainly for comfort and profit (as
considered above by Christer Sanne). The kind of sacrifice that may be required for writing this text is
expounded by Plato in his Theaetetus (p. 879f., § 174a-d,
in The Collected Dialogues of Plato) in
the first quote below about Thales, whose meaning hopefully will not need to be completed by the second
and last quote, from the Republic, (§ 586a-b):
[...T]he story about the Thracian maidservant who exercised her wit at the
expense of Thales, when he was looking up to study the stars and tumbled down a
well. She scoffed at him for being so eager to know what was happening in the
sky that he could not see what lay at his feet. Anyone who gives his life to
philosophy is open to such mockery.[...T]he world has the laugh of the
philosopher, partly because he seems arrogant, partly because his helpless
ignorance in matters of daily life.
The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such,
are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life
long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it,
nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward
with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed,
fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they
kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as
they are.