Information
and Theology
Implications for computer applications,
HCI and AI
by Kristo
Ivanov, prof.em., Umeå University
June 2018 (rev. 250912-1140)
<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
conflict in Ukraine and Gaza
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
A final return
to Christian anthropomorphism
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. If 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.
Long after I wrote the text of this paper, in imminent
Easter 2025, through my listening to a program in the Swedish public radio, Långfredagsmorgon om hallucinationer, [Good Friday morning
about hallucinations; saved
here] I realized that there are occasions for trying to
reduce religion to neuroscience. The process was seen as enabled by
illustrating it with references to the pioneer studies of “neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and writer” Oliver Sacks. To
make it simple: the whole Bible and all religions can be suspected of being
sorts of hallucinations.
This is done, of course, by ignoring the main question of what “reality” is, to
begin with philosophy of science and the “unconscious” in analytical
psychology.
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 as it is also
done by reducing religion to art, which would require a special section in this
paper such as a discussion of Richard
Shusterman’s “Art
and religion” (The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 2008, vol. 42, nr.3) based on his Pragmatist aesthetics,
relating it to Theological
aesthetics. 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".
Finally, the most tragic example of reduction of
religion to politics is the one that I witnessed after writing most the above,
namely the information on the conflict between
Israel and Hamas in Gaza, illustrated also in discussions about the
role of the Orthodox Russian church in the conflict between Russia, NATO and
Ukraine. The argument is developed in my two
articles about the information (linked above) on the two conflicts. The impulse
to write about them raised by my listening to the arguments in a documentary
with the telling title of Praying for Armageddon (it can be seen until further
notice in two parts, part 1 here and 2 here),
and about which I only
reproduce here two versions of its presentation that I saw after having seen it
in the Swedish public television after it has been shown in the British BBC:
In the United States, the Christian right has great influence. The revivalist
Christians are a power factor that constitutes an important part of Donald
Trump's voter base. They hope and pray for the end of the earth and the return
of Jesus. What could it mean for the future of the United States? Filmmaker Tonje
Hessen Schei examines the influence of Christian revivalists on the American
political landscape.
Praying for
Armageddon is a political thriller that explores the power and influence of
American Evangelical Christians as they aim to fulfil the Armageddon
prophecy. The film observes American believers as they prepare for what
they call The Holy War and exposes the powerful megachurch pastors who call for
the 'final battle' that they believe will trigger the Second Coming of Christ.
Completed before the current crisis in Israel and Gaza, it also unveils how
politicians driven by faith embrace the State of Israel as the key to their
prophetic vision for the end of days.
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 conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza
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, and perhaps more fundamentally in the later
case of Israel and Gaza that I consider in greater theological detail in another
especially dedicated text. 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 and its related historical scientific
biological lobotomy scandal?
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 rather 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 serious problem if humans are so downgraded as to
beginning to think and feel that “man after all is NOT the highest of the
things we meet in sensuous experience”, despite of most art culminating in
man’s sensuous experience when man is able to repeatedly appreciate one very
same invented genial fiction in theatrical text and images while distrusting
the “truth” of stories in holy books like the Bible. It is a paradox that has
implications for the modern atheistic conceptions of artificial
general 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.
Something that goes along with these problems is
modern man’s, especially in secularized culture, difficulty to understand, feel
and accept the idea that love is a
paramount divine value as expressed in Christianity. Not only love “for they
neighbor” but originally God’s love for humans as countered by human’s expected
love
of God and his teachings, as in the first Commandment. This
is the question of the origin of our feeling of love (as of justice) beyond
“tautological” references to so-called evolution since everything may have been
necessary for “the survival of the fittest”. Were comes our unconditional love
for our children from, up to the point of sacrificing our life for them, if not
also love for our beloved parents who gave us life, and consorts who have given
us the beloved children and from whom many who do not know love so swiftly
divorce and separate from? It is otherwise expressed also in a
couple of paragraphs in my paper on Artificial General Intelligence.
And anthropomorphism allowing the expression of the feeling of love can
ultimately be seen as a process for perceiving the Divine through the
archetypes dwelling in the human collective unconscious, as suggested towards
the end of my paper on Reason and Gender.
In such a context it is illustrative to consider what
the Swedish public radio, in the country that is often seen as the most
secularized in the world, produced on occasion of the Holy Thursday of May 29, of the year 2025, commemorating
the Christian belief of the bodily Ascension of
Jesus into Heaven. Without my having heard a single mention
of the ascension, the very ambitious program of almost one and half hour in the
series earlier denominated as dealing with religion, and later “people and
faith” and “life-view” [Swedish “livsåskådning”]
meaning a sort of philosophy of life or the German Weltanschauung
or worldview, or ideology. The program got the
particular title Det Heliga Vattnet [The Holy Water], and was presented as
follows, with a photo of a bottle of mineral water on a book about Holy Water, a Guide to Japan's Hot Springs:
- On the
day of Christ's Ascension, two of P1's editorial teams invite you to a live
spiritual early-morning from the lakeside.
- Nature Morning and Life View in P1 convey images
and sounds from two scenic places in Sweden. Water and its significance are at
the center of attention from both a spiritual and biological perspective during
this morning.
- How do
different worldviews view water? What rites and traditions are there around
water in different religions?
- What does
water mean for life on earth? In what way does water connect us to all living
things?
- The
questions may well outnumber the answers during the morning with conversations
and contributions from the five world religions through excerpts of themed devotions about water from the Devotional in P1.
- Towards the end of the program, it is
also about the Source - as a literal and figurative source of life and
creation.
So much for the Ascension of Jesus. The love of God,
in my view, has been one main if not only stumbling block in Carl Jung’s
treatment in “Answer to Job” (Collected Works vol. 11, pp.355-470,
§553-758) of the Bible’s Book of Job, where
he is tempted to discuss the concept of good and love. The reason may be the
problem of anthropomorphism and its limitations as they also appear in
discussions of the “existence” of God. Humans can barely understand what not
only love but even “existence” mean in terms of how existence might be defined
and tested. It appears already as mind-blowing in terms of astronomy
(illustrated also in a zoom-video
below) with its distances or related times (as from God or
the origin of love?!) such as billions of light-years,
leading in Wikipedia to affirmations such as
The comoving distance from the Earth to the edge of the
visible universe is about 45.7 billion light-years in any direction; this is
the comoving radius of the observable universe. This is larger than the age of the universe dictated by the cosmic background
radiation; see here for why this is possible.
Love and Evolutionary Self-Preservation
The next related 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,
up to the point of been tempted to divinize ourselves and even more AI for the
“power” of the mathematical mind. We reproduce towards our "neighbour" the very same love that it is said that God
or 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”.
Some years later, in 2025, a similar case,
serendipitously involving the same leader of the Christian Democratic Party,
was analyzed by Anna
W. Gustafsson, associate professor in Scandinavian
linguistics, in the Swedish journal Språktidningen (1,
2025, pp. 30 ff., elaborated excerpt from her article “Med berått
mod”, in Morfem, 2024). It concerned the
interpretation of her accusation of the government having taken a certain
controversial decision at the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemy. “Med berått mod” in its English
translation is symptomatically suggested to be “in
cold blood, willfully, with premeditation, with malice aforethought, quite
deliberately, intentionally”. By referring to a famous article by Hannah Arendt
on “Truth
and Politics” (The New Yorker, Feb. 25, 1967)
Gustafsson tries to unravel the problems around the politic use and meaning of
“Med berått mod”. It leads her to write, among other
things, the following:
To the
audience, the liar’s “truths” seem more logical, because the random and
unexpected have been eliminated and because they are consistent with their
perception of the world. Factual truths can be dismissed as “opinions” in the
debate. But also to blur the distinction between factual truth and opinion,
according to Hannah Arendt, is a form of lying. […] it is in the very essence
of politics that the proponent of a certain policy wants to change the world.
This makes the politician a person who acts, rather than a truth-teller. […]
What place
do lies have in a discussion about what can be implied by the expression with
deliberate courage? First, truth and lies are important themes in politics, and
second, the political debaters’ and listeners’ perceptions of what is truth or
lie will depend on the assumptions they make about the speaker’s intentions,
what expectations they have of the conversation – and on what is implied by
linguistic means. Because when you start to examine discussions about truth and
lies in the political debate, you see that it is almost always about
assumptions.
Yes, and “assumptions” may be the willful or unwilling
result of the choice of facts, some
fact being unknown to some but known to others. And it may be not only a
question of choice among already
certified “data” on facts, but also a
question of (also from Latin language) “capta” as
remembered by Johanna Drucker,
author of Graphesis: Visual forms of knowledge production,
when stating
e.g. that “Data are capta, taken not
given, constructed as an interpretation of the phenomenal world, not inherent
in it”. As in physics when “data” on, say,
acceleration, momentum or spin could not have
been “chosen” prior to their capta as conception of
the variables, and the design of a process or equipment for their measurement.
Then, so called disinformation is
not a question of whether the information is factual or not, but rather whether
it is sufficiently complete in a system of
thought, or it is not complete, as related to “whose” systematic intentions and knowledge. As it may have been the case
of the Galileo affair but also of complex politics. These cases become even
more interesting if related to the framing of it all in terms of philosophy of
science by West Churchman in his The
Design of Inquiring Systems with its follower The Systems Approach and its Enemies. And further 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" but mainly “love” 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.
Many of these thoughts were elaborated long after the
ramblings and writing of this section on the theodicy, in a paper on Reason and Gender, while I came to a better understanding of the theodicy
itself by means of its relation to love, by struggling with the Carmelite monk Wilfrid
Stinissen’s book Into your hands, Father (also here,
esp. chap. 4) written under the
influence of John of the
Cross. It requires a liberation from the suspicion that it
all is a sort of tautology or sophism, such as that God does not appreciate
evil deeds but allows them to be done
because in his omniscience and omnipotence he knows to be able to transform
their ultimate workings and consequences in integral love and good. Such
reasoning, however, also illustrates the abusive use and limitations of logic,
which Stinissen exposes as typical in the reading of
the Bible, in his other book The word is very near you. I also expose such abusive use of logic
in science, in my text of AI and
artificial general intelligence. It also appears in atheistic
evolutionist explanations of source of the feeling of love and goodness, and
why not also justice (but what about of-evil?) as arising from their ultimately
having fostered the survival of the
fittest.
Liberation from the suspicion of tautology or sophism,
may be attained in the hard struggle for understanding the classic biblical Book of Job to which, by the way, the psychologist
Carl Jung also dedicated the theologically controversial essay Answer to Job,
which most probably tells more about Jung than about a true theodicy. Jung’s
message is incorporated to the German culture (Friedrich
Nietzsche and the rest), which may have contributed
to the “misunderstandings” that allowed the Holocaust. The liberation from the
suspicion of tautology or sophism, however, may be attained by means of an
investigation into the meaning and origin of humans’ intuitions of music (such as tears as above), or of poetry, or in strong sentiments of justice, but mostly in the powerful experience of love of our beloved, up in promptitude
in sacrificing our own life for rescuing the family, the extended social
family, or for God in martyrdom. It includes the relation between eros
(and logos),
and agape or charity. A
theologian I consulted about primary sources beyond Stinissen
recommended Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica,
Part I, questions
22, 48 and 49; his Compendium
theologiae, chap.
142; and Catechism
of the Catholic Church, numbers
309-314 and 412.
I am convinced that these references address the core
problem of evil, its source, and what and how to meet it, instead of reducing
it to a self-satisfying appreciation (“how good we are, while they are
evil”) of war tourism or of the “myth of disinformation” as
illustrated in tragedies such as the Israel-Hamas
information war and the related examples of “artistic”
accounts by friends
of Israel vs. of Palestine.
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 powerful 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 a theological digression on the relation between conscience
and truth, and 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.
A
final return to Christian anthropomorphism
Long after having written the main of all the text
above, I am tempted to also remark that the recourse to theology, even for
those who do not have religious faith is a reasonable attitude deriving from
the very consciousness of, and consequent humility awakened from one main
insight. It is the insight that we humans despite of or because of an
Ego-inflation do know so little, and need a psychic bridge to what analytical
psychology names as the
unconscious. It should be easily
intuited from astronomical and cosmological knowledge about our own apparent
nothingness on our lonely small planet in the universe: see a most powerful
“zoom-video” here,
here and again here,
saved here. And, please note that the zoom, as visualization of
our scientific conception of the universe, because of some reason happens to start
and end “anthropomorphically” with the image of a lovely woman.
It should be intuited also from the present hype on world
climate warming, not to mention latest,
historically recurring cruelties in daily human relations, exemplified lately
in world wars and other such as in Gaza,
Ukraine and Sudanese
civil wars, where e.g. the Ukrainian war could easily lead to a
third world war. It is a psychic awareness that the whole humanity is like a Titanic and its designer Thomas Andrews navigating in the
oceans, awaiting a final third and/or last world war, or individual death. It
may also explain the insight and motivations of the number of names in the List of Christians in Science and Technology.
Our perceived human nothingness in the understanding the universe may require
the humility of seeing ourselves, as Jung writes, analogues of the above mentioned ants
entering the British Museum.
The immensely big and immensely small, should make us
feel our apparent nothingness of and the nothingness of our understanding. It
requires an aesthetically religious way of framing our attitude to life and to
the unknowable unconscious. It is analog to what humans experience in their
feeling of desperately overwhelming love, justifying the earlier need of
integration of dimensions of the psyche through the complexities of
anthropomorphism, as in the mysterious concept of Trinity
and its problematic understanding and influence in analytical psychology.
The requirement of anthropomorphism may correspond to
the reason for the historical advent of Christ, and it may what opens the
conviction of the “existence” of God as most credible source of the feeling
of the “anthropomorphic”
love between man and woman in Christ, and parents and children, genuine
love up to the point of being ready to sacrifice the own life for it. As well
as the source of the feeling of justice, up to be able to resist the
temptation of believing to be able to judge God being (or having been) unjust.
As Jung did in his famous Answer
to Job, commentary to the Book
of Job, or those (“ethnoreligious-cultural”?) Jews did who deemed
to be able to judge that “God
cannot exist” after the tragedy of the Holocaust, forgetting or
ignoring the Bible’s 1 Kings 9:6-9. It all may require to be paired with
our repeated viewing and experiencing of great works of art, culturally
influenced by holy books. The alternative or complement is religious mysticism
such as in the Catholic Carmelite
tradition, exemplified lately in the work of Wilfrid
Stinessen, inspired as he was by John
of the Cross.
Conclusion? I must confess that, antiquated as it may
seem, with increasing age (now 87) I get definitely convinced that most serious
problems afflicting our society, such as conflicts and wars, are a consequence
of the decreasing importance given to religion, and theology. In our case it is
mainly a question of Christianism. It leads thought to the Book of Revelation. I illustrate this with
the relation between man and woman in the modern “family” in my paper on Reason and gender, and its consequences in Artificial General Intelligence and information on the mentioned conflicts
in Ukraine and
Gaza, not to mention those in
Sudan and Congo. Many if not most of
us have accepted to see science and/or aesthetics such as in art and literature
together with faith in “democracy” as substitutes of religion. In the West,
people may wish and need to read or see, mindfully or mindlessly, repeated performances
of “fictional” literary works, paintings, sculpture, architecture, musical
pieces, operas, theater plays and “design” that awaken important feelings,
while disdaining holy books and religious rituals for being “fiction”. This
seems to imply an immense unperceived contempt for the judgment and efforts of
past and present majority of populations of the world. Outside the “little
western peninsula
of Asia called Europe” they have seen and see
religion as an absolutely necessary base for their living.
Conclusion, again? It is not a question of thinking
elite versus working proletariat, it is rather of a call to modesty in debates,
which I try to address in the third paragraph of my General Disclaimer. The more so when
matters get gradually more complicated because tasks were expected to become
simple and automated with advanced technology. If that strives mainly for
power, comfort and profit as considered above by Christer Sanne, and lately in the
context of the hype of so-called artificial intelligence – AI. The kind of sacrifice that may be required for writing this text
is not to be expected from AI, and it 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.
---- The End ----