How Not To Know God

[rug]

May 15, 2013
By Marc

The word “eternity” scares us post-Christians. It was no contradiction for atheists like Nietzsche to disavow the existence of God while simultaneously reveling in the idea of eternity, but now that popular atheism has been irretrievably wed to the idea that truth is only in the material world, and that physical science rightfully usurps all other forms of knowledge, a rejection of God has come to mean a simultaneous rejection of eternity. Why? Because if truth is only known through science, and science deals with the physical world in its nebulas, atoms, and electromagnetic fields, then the one truth we must be absolutely sure of is that nothing is eternal, for the physical world is moving from a state of order to a state of final chaos. Entropy dictates a crumbling of the cosmic cookie. All things are exhaustible.

Now I’m not here to prove the existence of eternity. But if one were to stand up for its presence in human life, I imagine the first thing worth requesting of its critics would be to use an appropriate lens. If I deny the existence of bacteria by refusing to use a microscope, I hardly qualify as a serious scientist.

A similar issue plagues the denial of eternity. We ask that eternity — the inexhaustible and everlasting — be shown, as the nebula is shown, that is, as an object available to objective verification, but eternity is not a thing, it is only revealed by things. Or rather, knowing that eternity cannot be shown in a way subject to empirical science, we assume a priori that it is an illusion, and subsequently conduct scientific research to show the physicality of all human experiences that claim contact with the eternal. The God Helmet experiments come to mind, but these are notoriously dumb. Far more credible are the experiments regarding the nature of human love.

Contra the poets, contra the philosophers, and contra the theologians, in an objective, outside, scientific view of love, the thing is hardly eternal. Parents divorce, friendships fail, families scream, and even were two homo sapiens to claim eternal love and never cease loving for a second of their lives, still death would put an end to it all. From the view of a Martian regarding the phenomenon of love as a disinterested third party, we can safely say that love has nothing to do with eternity. This “ideal view” been taken by the scientists. “It’s all about the dopamine,” we’ve heard and heard again, or the serotonin, or the oxytocin. We can, as disinterested third parties, observe these chemicals in the brain, and these are finite, fading chemicals.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2013/05/how-not-to-know-god.html

[JustFiveMoreMinutes]

1. Got to the following statement in the diatribe..

... " physical science rightfully usurps all other forms of knowledge"... and then I just couldn't read any more.

'all other forms of KNOWLEDGE'?????????????????????????? Without being able to question the writer on his definition of 'knowledge'...
I didn't see any sense in going any futher since from the context I'm afraid he's going into pseudo-science.

Just sayin'.

[rug]

4. Well, if you say there is no other knowledge than physical science, you've made his point.

[longship]

2. Huh? Maybe he means "How Not to Know Anything."

Je ne comprend pas.

I read this article and it comes out, "Blah, blah, blah, blah,

Tardigrade picture.

Blah, blah, blah, blah.


Seratonin and dopamine cartoon.

Blah, blah blah, blah.


Pic of guy playing a guitar, a black guy.

(Then he promises to get to the heart of the issue. Meanwhile, I continue reading...)

Blah, blah, blah, blah blah.

Some weird photoshopped tree in a crystal dome thingie. (And here's my only actual quote from this article.)

The tree is beautiful, unaffected by the passage of time. It was, is, and always will be big and branching, immense and inviting. Delighting in its eternity, men and women climb its branches and eat its fruit. Now, if a man refused to be in the tree and to eat its fruit, his absence of action would be no evidence against the eternal nature of the tree. It would only be evidence of his inaction. So too with love.

I won't bother anybody here any further with this utter newage (new age, but rhymes with sewage).

It reminds me of post modernist word salad. Throw out some scienterrific words and you can claim credibility even though nothing you write makes any sense.

Rubbish, utter rubbish.

Sorry, friends.

on edit: the only pic in the article that has any context to what is written is the tree. That's why I quoted what I quoted. It's still word salad rubbish.

On on edit: better title.

[rug]

5. What do you have against tardigrade water bears?

[longship]

6. Love them!!! Whole bunches!

I just think that if you're gonna use a tardigrade pic, one ought to at least mention them. The cute devils deserve at least that. After all, they can survive almost anything the Earth or deep space can fling at them. They deserve some modicum of respect.

But to use a tardigrade like a Playboy centerfold in a post modernist ramble goes too far. Why objectify such a noble animalcule for such crass exploitation?

Here I must stand my ground.

[rug]

7. Well, since you are paraphrasing Martin Luther, I am rendered mute.

[longship]

10. Was I? I am shocked. Didn't even know it.

Now where are those treatises on tardigrades, my hammer, and those nails I was saving. They're never handy when you need them.

[rug]

11. "Here I stand, I can do no other. May God help me. Amen."

Words allegedly spoken by Luther at his trial before the Diet of Worms.

[upaloopa]

3. Why is there a need to invent support mechinisms for

your beliefs. I thought faith took care of that. You can't be strong in faith if you have to prove what you believe to yourself and use denial of the opposite as further support.
Blessed are those who believe and have not seen
Jesus Christ

[Jim__]

8. 'love as experienced by an objective, disinterested party is not “more truthfully known,” but less'

Well said.

[Zoeisright]

9. That is the most discordant,

rambling, nonsensical piece of crap I've ever tried to read. Sheesh.

[LostOne4Ever]

14. Zoeisright is right (nt)

[MattBaggins]

23. The smart kid who spent the night before his final

getting stoned instead of studying.

[LiberalAndProud]

12. He waxes poetic.

So love appears to the lover as eternal, an ecstasy from the physical world, a transcendence from the bonds of matter and time. This mysticism is only ridiculous if we take on the view of one outside, peering in on love, but by doing so we cease to look at love, which is known in the loving, not the looking.

So when the atheist laughs at me for believing in “an invisible man in the sky,” I can’t help but laugh with him, for treating God as an observable object and arriving at disbelief is as ridiculous as my treating microbes as macrobes, refusing to use a microscope, and arriving at a disbelief in microbial life. What’s needed is the right perspective. God is not known in the observing. God is love, and is known in the loving.

It's never left at that, is it?

The LORD is a jealous and avenging God; the LORD takes vengeance and is filled with wrath. The LORD takes vengeance on his foes and maintains his wrath against his enemies.

[LostOne4Ever]

13. Headache

God, the section on love was a whole lot of words that said nothing at all. Gave me a headache

but now that popular atheism has been irretrievably wed to the idea that truth is only in the material world, and that physical science rightfully usurps all other forms of knowledge, a rejection of God has come to mean a simultaneous rejection of eternity.

Atheism isn't wed to anything other than a lack of belief in deities. He means skepticism. Just because an atheist is skeptical of god does not mean they will be skeptical of other claims that lack evidence and require blind faith. There are some that believe in rather absurd belief systems that no sane person would believe in. For example, Ayn Rand believed in Laissez faire free market capitalism

There is also a profound mis-understanding on the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the definition of entropy in this article. Entropy being defined as Chaos is an overly simplistic way of explaining the concept to high school students. In actuality, it is the tendency for energy to try and spread itself out into as many different forms as possible. It seeks equilibrium. Chaos is a result of this process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

This is why all system eventually break down, but the energy remains the same.

And this brings us to his biggest mistake. Energy by the first law of thermodynamics can not be created or destroyed. Thus energy is eternal and found in the material world. Of course, this does not prove the existence of an afterlife or God.

"Now I’m not here to prove the existence of eternity. But if one were to stand up for its presence in human life, I imagine the first thing worth requesting of its critics would be to use an appropriate lens. If I deny the existence of bacteria by refusing to use a microscope, I hardly qualify as a serious scientist. "

If someone purport that bacteria exists without any proof then they are not a scientist at all! Scientist make hypothesis based off of evidence, test the hypothesis BEFORE MAKING ANY CLAIMS and then have their peers attempt to duplicate their work. What they don't do, is make claims and then look for evidence to back up their personal beliefs! That is the realm of pseudo-scientists.

Paragraph 3-8:

....
GET TO THE FREAKING POINT ALREADY.

Stuff about Love:

Love is an evolutionary mechanism to keep mates together and protect their family to better ensure biological fitness. Further, experiencing is not always knowing. One can experience something and it not be real or we misunderstand it. This happens all the time when people experience dreams or have hallucinations. We experience them and they feel so real to us, and find out that they don't even exist at all. The sad fact is its possible you might be dreaming right now and not even realize it. People have thought they were in love and it turned out they were wrong. Others mistake lust for love, and still others are in love with the idea of being in love. Then there are those who love fades and turns to hate.

Tree analogy:

What i got from this section is that the author is saying that the tree is unknowable unless you experience it. Fine. However, the tree could also be nothing other than a bad metaphor that does not exist anywhere but in the author's mind as well. Unless you have been there and collect evidence there is no way to know. It could be there, or it might not exist.

In the end, he mentions a bunch of metaphysical mumbo jumbo about love that does not support what he think it does, and then proceeds to use a broad brush generalization against atheists. So once again we are left with a question with no evidence either way. You either believe (theist) or don't believe (atheist).

[muriel_volestrangler]

15. I can't work out why that's in the 'Catholic' section of Patheos

He describes himself as 'post-Christian', and sums the piece up with:

So when the atheist laughs at me for believing in “an invisible man in the sky,” I can’t help but laugh with him, for treating God as an observable object and arriving at disbelief is as ridiculous as my treating microbes as macrobes, refusing to use a microscope, and arriving at a disbelief in microbial life. What’s needed is the right perspective. God is not known in the observing. God is love, and is known in the loving.

So he clearly doesn't regard himself as Christian, or believe that Jesus was God. So what has he to do with Catholics?

It all seems like wishful thinking, to me. He wants his feeling of love to go on forever, so he claims it can. And he also claims it existed before he ever met the object of his adoration. He has nothing to support these ideas beyond "wouldn't it be really cool?" His idea of 'God' just looks like a tool to make him feel more important. An antidote, if you will, to the concept of Total Perspective Vortex.

[Jim__]

16. I think he's Catholic.

His previous posts certainly indicate that he is. For instance, from a previous column:

In my many conversations with atheists, agnostics, secularists and the rest, I find there are very few things that actually interest them about the Catholic faith: very few things besides the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The question I am most asked about my faith is “can a non-Catholic go to Confession?”

Post-christian may refer to the era. Here's an excerpt from a 2009 column on Patheos, Post-Christian or polarized:

The debate about Newsweek’s cover story of a few weeks ago by editor Jon Meacham, “The End of Christian America,” continues to intrigue journalists both across the pond (as noted earlier this week) and over here. When an opinion column addresses a topic we’ve covered (numerous times) then we consider it worth a mention.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. But he doesn't think God is something you can point to

Therefore, he cannot believe in basic Catholic doctrine. He does not believe Jesus was an incarnation of God. This isn't a bit of heterodoxy about transubstantiation or other little details. This is the central point of mainstream Christianity - that Jesus was divine.

[Jim__]

18. He believes Jesus was God.

At least if you accept another of his columns, The Agony in the Garden:

Perhaps it would be best to remind ourselves of what the Christ is facing. He and he alone — being an infinite being — can redeem mankind’s infinite distance from God. He must become Sin, and be destroyed, so that Sin may be destroyed. He must take on the guilt and condemnation that belongs to every genocidal monster, pedophile priest, rapist, and murderer who ever existed. He must experience the sting of every human insult, hatred, oppression, and violence. He must enter every broken, masturbating, porn-addicted, drug-riddled shell of a man, and experience the total sum of our modern loneliness. This is what Love demands. Again, Love is desiring another’s ultimate good. What is our ultimate good? Eternal union with our Father. What price must the Christ pay for our ultimate good? Suffering unto death, the death of God.

And so Love sweats blood. In stark contradiction to the pretty shape our modern world would have us draw, Christ offers us a heart of meat, ventricles and arteries pounding. Let’s together cease pretending Love is anything else. Let us cease splitting Love from it’s meaning — wanting the ultimate good of the other — and thus from suffering. Let us instead look to Christ’s Agony in the Garden, and beg God to set us ablaze with His uncomfortable, aching Love, the only kind worth having.

[muriel_volestrangler]

19. Well, in that case, he regularly points at God as a real thing

and this current blog entry is meaningless twaddle that he doesn't actually believe.

[Jim__]

20. I don't see any contradictions between the 2 posts.

But, be that as it may, I do believe he is Catholic, and that is why it's in the 'Catholic' section of Patheos.

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. "treating God as an observable object ..."

Jesus was an observable object. Or so Catholic doctrine holds.

[Jim__]

22. Granting that he can "observe" Jesus, he cannot "observe" that Jesus is an infinite being.

So when the atheist laughs at me for believing in “an invisible man in the sky,” I can’t help but laugh with him, for treating God as an observable object and arriving at disbelief is as ridiculous as my treating microbes as macrobes, refusing to use a microscope, and arriving at a disbelief in microbial life. What’s needed is the right perspective. God is not known in the observing. God is love, and is known in the loving.

Again, I don't see any contradiction.