Why bother with God? (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 11, 2011, 12:41 (4755 days ago)

The following exchange is under "Intelligent Design I Could Get Behind":-MATT: That works great for traditional Christian/Muslim/Jewish ideas for "Intelligent Design" but it doesn't account for deistic (as in deism) or maltheistic approaches. Though one would ask what the point would be in worshipping either of those kinds of Gods...-DAVID: That is why my 'third way' is so comfortable. God is not what religions describe, or atheists attack. A universal mind may not have beneficence, may or may not be all-knowing, or 100% in total control. Yet whatever created the universe and then life, used information and laws, as a universal intelligence would obviously have to use to create.-MATT: And I've mentioned it before, but even your third option doesn't have an answer for the question 'why?' as in 'why conceive of' or 'why respect' or 'why worship?'
Looked at another way, we always have lived without our apathetic creator... so why even bother? (no pun intended... BUT...) The "questions" said deity answers, aren't really answered. It's perhaps an emotional satisfaction and nothing more.-This dialogue seems to me so fundamental to many of our discussions that I'm opening a new thread for it. Matt's final question is: why even bother? If there's no God, or an indifferent God, I see no point either, apart from satisfying our intellectual curiosity about our own origins and the nature of the universe we live in. Whether there has to be a point is another matter which I'll return to later. Matt is also quite right, though, about the emotional satisfaction that most religious people seem to derive from reading various attributes into their God's mind. From my position on the fence, I can see no evidence for any of them ... beneficence, omniscience, omnipotence, as listed by David ... since the world as I see it could just as easily reflect the opposite. And so if there's no God or an indifferent God, that's fine with me. I live my life with no reference to or dependence on religious beliefs anyway, and I'm very happy without them.-The temptation, then, is to shrug one's shoulders and drop the subject altogether. But it won't go away, and not just because of the human compulsion to have answers to unsolved mysteries. For me a major consideration is the 
possibility that we are not just bodies, and that the mind and identity might move into different dimensions once the body dies. This is not something I hanker after ... a peaceful sleep is nothing to fear (though I do fear the manner of its happening) ... but it's not an idea I can ignore, let alone dismiss. Here my views diverge from Matt's, because OBEs and NDEs and other psychic phenomena are things I take seriously. There are simply too many examples in our own and in other cultures for me to dismiss them. Some kind of afterlife, as envisaged by Christianity or Islam, or by mystics, or as hinted at by those who have returned from NDEs, would quite literally add new dimensions to the whole discussion. This is an important reason why the subject can't be shrugged off.-Another is that despite the impossibility of knowing (a) whether God/a UI exists, and (b) what may be its nature, that very impossibility leaves room for endless speculation. And because we are human, and humans since time immemorial have come up with their own versions of what may or may not be the same creative power(s), I find it impossible to dismiss every variation as fantasy. The ancients were far closer to Nature than we are. Does that mean they were more or less ignorant than we are? Science has clearly brought us infinitely greater insights into the material world, but has that been at the cost of - for want of a better word - a "spiritual" world? Matt's explorations of Eastern mysticism suggest that for him too this is a reason for "bothering".-Finally, let me return to the question of a "point". I must confess to huge respect, almost veneration, for certain humans whose work seems to me to reach heights that are almost superhuman. I'm thinking of figures like Shakespeare and Beethoven, though we will all have different heroes. There is no point to my admiration ... it's simply what I feel. Even allowing for its cruelties and tragedies, the miraculous variety of life on earth (which incidentally would be impossible without the very real passage of what some of us call "time") transcends by an infinite amount the achievements of those heroes. Awe, wonderment, veneration...no, there are no words that can even begin to capture my feelings towards whatever may have brought life about, whether it's impersonal Nature or a conscious intelligence. I don't have the faith to make me bend the knee, but I have to acknowledge that even if there's no point, there's still good reason to 'conceive of', 'respect' and even 'worship' the great whatever-it-is.