Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Friday, November 06, 2009, 22:27 (5495 days ago) @ dhw

This post will look at the various things you say in your penultimate paragraph.-"All there is is the physical."-What is meant by this is that all the efficient causes in the universe are physically based. Don't conclude anything if your understanding of the quote differs from this more expanded meaning.-"God has an infinite consciousness which may or may not be physical."-Well, here is the paradox. All physical things are finite and so God's consciousness could not be physical. Yet the experience we have in mystical union is of something infinite, and at the same time our consciousness "arises" out of our three pound brain (or however much it weighs: I forget). How is that possible? That's one of the problems with trying to "pin down" descriptions of religious experience, which of course is precisely what you're trying to do. You're trying to reduce religious experience to something finite just because it is grounded in something finite (the three pound lump of physical mush we call a brain).-The paradox is that our finite consciousness suddenly "breaks through" its finite origin into the infinite expanses of the divine when it gets "down" to the base of its being and "discovers" that there's an open channel down there to the infinite. As long as you try to analyze this logically, you're going to get into trouble, necessarily concluding that it's all nonsense and baseless. All I can say is that sometimes human beings discover that the apparently limited and finite basis of consciousnes, the human brain, can "break through" to infinite realms. I've tried to "explain" this by attributing it to a "discovery" that there is infinitely more to the potentialities of physical matter when it is sufficiently organized and complex than "reason" allows. Sorry, but that's the best I can do here. It's something that human being just sometimes discover for themselves, regardless of any accompanying scientific and logical reasoning.-"He is within and without the universe, and his purpose is to see himself reflected in it."-"Within" means he can look up into the world through organisms, when they are sufficiently complex. Then through their consciousness of the world, God can hope to see how matter is revealing his beauty, depth, and expansiveness.-The rest of the paragraph you're quoting from is close enough for government work. I'll have to see what you have up your sleeve if I accept that, before I make further clarifications.