Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 20:49 (5504 days ago) @ dhw

"However, the latter may possibly be the reason for your dismissive response to this issue."-I think you're making too much of this. I hope it's clear by now that my main objection was to the form with which you expressed your agnosticism, saying you don't believe this and you don't believe that, when this and that are mutually exclusive. You can't not believe in both of them. What you can do is say you don't know what the truth of the matter is.-"this suggests that your theology follows on from your faith, and not the other way round." I meant more than to "suggest" this. I meant to make it clear that it is a fact. I didn't have faith until I had a mystical experience, and fragmentary experiences like it ever since. Without that experience, I'd still be an agnostic, just like you. It was only in the face of that experience that I felt compelled to come up with a coherent belief system, one that was fully in consonance with the findings of modern science. That soon led to my discovery of process thought, that I've studied through several decades because it rang so many bells for me.-Now I see that you're about to take me to task for putting faith before theology. So let me read on...-"One might argue that if you don't need God to explain how life came into being, you only need him for your personal comfort, which of course is best served by a loving image."-Actually what I encountered in my religious experience was a God of overwhelming love. That was given in my experience. It was not a conclusion I came to because it made me feel good. Once I had that, I had to account for other things I knew about life in the big city, like all the pain and suffering in the world. That primordial experience of a loving God is what made it so clear to me that God must not have efficient power in the world, that he cannot work miracles. The consequences of that just got more and more sophisticated the longer I thought about it, and it all added up to an entirely coherent theology: all knowing, all good, but not all powerful. That as it turns out is the God of process theology, which is why I found it so appealing when I encountered it.-"However, in your theological rationalization of this belief, I can't help wondering what underlies your apparent reluctance to accept the possibility that God might have been responsible for creating life."-Easy. My "marriage" with the scientific enterprise. I'm sold on it. But let me not be quite so dismissive. In a fundamental sense, God is responsible for everything, in the sense of its very being. But he is not responsible for the form of particular organisms.-Over and over throughout the history of modern science, the "God of the Gaps" has been refuted, so it didn't take me long to dispense with it entirely. It was too easy to dispense with the God of efficient causes not to do it. It left me entirely free to wallow in the findings of modern science, while at the same time continuing to evolve a theology of the loving, supportive God I found in my own experience.-'Bearing in mind your insistence that the world is "exclusively physical", this seems to me to coincide precisely with the idea that God set up the initial mechanism of life and evolution, with its potential to produce human beings ... the very principle which you seem willing to dismiss.'-Not the way I conceive things. God didn't have to "set up" anything. The fundamental laws of nature flow out of the very nature of God and flow out naturally, without God having to think about or devise anything.-"I'm surprised that your world is only physical."-Only??? Sounds like you're short-changing the physical. I don't. I recognize that within the physical the unlimited beauty of God can be expressed. There is infinite profundity, beauty, and depth within the physical, exactly as there is in God. -"I don't understand how this infinite consciousness (or indeed my finite consciousness) can be produced by an exclusively physical world."-Again, you're entirely short-changing the possibilities of the physical. Within the physical are all the potentialities of consciousness, when it evolves up into organisms of a certain focussed complexity. The physical is not just a pile of rocks or dead, rotting meat. It has all the potentialities of God wrapped up in it. When Alan Watts said, "This is It," he didn't mean to shortchange existence. He meant to glorify it.-"Does God have brain cells?" I love your questions. In my own mystical experience, I experienced a God of infinite complexity that grows in the face of the universe that in a fundamental sense is his life. So unlike Dawkins' wishful thinking, I am not hamstrung by the notion of a perfectly simple God, as appears in classical theology. In saying that, you probably think I'm opening up an entirely new can of worms. Have at it.-I just don't know what to make of your final paragraph. Maybe someday we can get into what it could possibly mean to say that there are worlds parallel to our own and identical in all respects except for nonsensical things such as a George Bush with a high IQ.