Have some slush
John Haught says, in God and the New Atheism, that gnu atheists get faith all wrong, at least from the point of view of theology, which
thinks of faith as a state of self-surrender in which one’s whole being, and not just the intellect, is experienced as being carried away into a dimension of reality that is much deeper and more real than anything that can be grasped by science and reason. [p 13]
You know…there’s a problem here. I would like to say something sober and restrained about that; I would like to give a cool, sarcasm-free account of what I think is wrong with it, for once; but I find it very hard to do that, because it seems so babyish. I can’t get past the babyish quality, because if I do, there’s nothing left. It’s babyish all the way down. And that’s typical of Haught, at least in this book. It’s just packed with baby talk.
But I’ll give it a shot. The trouble is (obviously) that “a state of self-surrender” is indistinguishable from a state of self-deception, and is the sort of state to invite self-deception. An experience of being carried away into a gurgle-gurgle sounds just like either a hallucination or a powerful daydream. Period. There’s nothing else to say about it. That’s what’s so babyish – Haught has dressed it up in the usual boring purple language to make it look significant and meaningful and maybe even true, and that’s just silly. He’s also installed a handy device for forestalling the question “yes but what exactly do you mean by ‘a dimension of reality that is much deeper and more real than’ yak yak?” by making it the faculty that asks the question the comparison. That question is an emissary from science and reason, and the dimension is much deeper and more real than that, so the question is by definition not answerable, so ha.
…there are many channels other than science through which we all experience, understand, and know the world…To take account of the evidence of subjective depth that I encounter in the face of another person, I need to adopt a stance of vulnerability. [p 45]
Bollocks. He’s talking about unconscious processing, among other things (like empathy, intuition, and the like), but those are not dependent on adopting “a stance of vulnerability.” He uses sentimentality to persuade, and it’s a babyish trick.
…if the universe is encompassed by an infinite Love, would the encounter with this ultimate reality require anything less than a posture of receptivity and readiness to surrender to its embrace?
Same thing – attempted persuasion via sentimentality. Why infinite Love? Why not infinite Hate?
Well we know why: because when you go limp and let yourself go off into a lovely fantasy, you don’t fantasize about infinite Hate. But Haught’s confidence that his fantasies reflect reality (and indeed are realer than anything else) is…foolish.
Given that only an infinitesimal fraction of the universe has conditions which will sustain our kind of life for more than a few seconds, and longer term survival is granted only grudgingly (in that it requires curtailing the survival of other organisms on regular basis, and many of them are anxious to return the favour), and even that is often capriciously cut short by meteorological or geological processes, well, one could be excused for suspecting that maybe the universe is encompassed by infinite Hate.
However, as far as we can tell, it’s only encompassed by infinite Indifference.
Funny, I always thought the universe was encompassed by Infinite Rickrolling.
What a load of wish fulfilling crap. Theology just doesn’t seem worth it to me. I mean those bits that are specifically of Theology, and not shared with other disciplines like criticism, etc. What was it that Hume said? Cast it into the flames, let’s have a paganesque book burning using Theologicial tomes as fuel!
OK, might have woken up on the wrong sided of the bed today.
It seems that the only way to enter these “hidden dimensions of reality” is to acquire a degree of subliminal lunacy.
subliminal lunacy
So, you’re like, insane in a non obvious or nearly imperceptible way? That rules me out. I’m clearly bonkers.
Mmmm…I don’t know about guys but I like a nice Balsamic Vinaigrette on my Word Salad.
The only place for thinking is the brain – not the heart, not the soul, not the gut, not the bones, not the ….
If it isn’t happening there – it is just not happening.
In my day, it was via psychedelics. Proving, of course, that any such “state” is purely physiological and thus totally amenable to scientific inquiry.
Well, obvious to everyone except those who possess it. Like the faithful who’s somewhat doubtful, or the apophatuous who’s somewhat delirious.
Any chance he’s fumbling away at something like Kitcher’s “orientation model” of faith? Kitcher’s proposal (from the second-hand accounts I’ve read, most notably Blackford’s) seems like at least a good start on understanding modes of religion that don’t primarily rely on truth-claims (which invariably turn out to be dubious at best). But where Kitcher is clear, Haught is putting out word salad. Is Haught yet another one trying to claim that such non-propositional religion is the “true” religion (despite it almost certainly being a minority position in the world), and we gnus are shooting at an undeserving target?
Yes lying is really deep. Lying can be grasped by science and reason though, your days of lying are numbered.
You don’t have any special senses, lying is not a sense.
What-if is fantasy and not reality. Reality says God is a lie. Your days of lying are numbered.
I like how the theologians have made their attempts at domination less threatening. Back in the day of Meister Eckhart, the command was: “Obey”; now the advice is, “Lay down your arms”. The latter is much more soothing to my inner baby. Goo goo.
In all seriousness, I guess the appeal to sentimentality is probably an attempt to get the reader to open up their sympathies, clear out the ego, that sort of thing. And if we were to assume that sympathy is the source of our moral convictions, then putting oneself in a state of sympathy would in fact be instructive.
The problem is that sympathy alone is not, and cannot be, the source of all morality. The fact of the matter is that we are morally entitled to resent those that trespass against us — and resentment is in some sense the opposite of sympathy. As a result, unchained sympathy in isolation does not put us in a better position to absorb new moral truths.
The clear message is that critical thinking is a hindrance to understanding Christianity. Having such a message conveyed to you is as good an indication as any that you’ve become involved with a cult. I’ll take the hellfire sermons any day. This kind of stuff creeps me out.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Camus Dude. Camus Dude said: Any time someone says "deeper" or "more real than" reality I think "imaginary". Haught is utter nonsense. http://t.co/YmzVQxT […]
This has moved past infantile into just plain creepy and disgusting. How is this different from any other abusive relationship ?
Given that one of the more common accusations the religious hurl at atheists is the one of nihilism, this complete abnegation of self is hypocritical in the extreme. Talk about a life without meaning.
Religion, asking those sophisticated questions that are not actually questions and pretending to know the answer.
Is this what they mean when they say that only Jesus can fill that void in your “soul”.
Colour me Freudian, but is this just sublimated sexual desire “that dare not speak it”s name” ?
I sometimes enter a state of self-surrender when listening to Mahler. However, there is ample evidence that He existed, and that He was the actual author of the works attributed to Him.
And then, of course, there’s sex…if memory serves… :p
See that storm brewing on the social horizon? We call it cognitive science.
What an eye roller.
This is really quite silly. John Haught, for all his wordiness, has no idea how words mean. You can’t just join words together and expect that they will make sense, unless you have some idea what you are saying. But if you read the first quotation that Ophelia gives us, there is no way he could know what he means. Well, on second thought, there is perhaps one interpretation that will make sense of those words.
Faith we are asked to think, is “a state of self-surrender in which one’s whole being, and not just the intellect, is experienced as being carried away into a dimension of reality that is much deeper and more real than anything that can be grasped by science and reason.” ‘Self-surrender’ won’t work here. Surrender has to be made to something, but there is nothing to surrender yourself to. Your whole being, whatever that is, is going to be carried away. How carried away? Carried away, in the sense in which, sometimes you get carried away and do something silly, because you weren’t pay attention? Perhaps. What other meaning could he give to being carried away here? Actually wafted away… what, body and soul too? Do you feel your body being carried away (as you very well might in drug or out of body experience)? Or are you carried away in some other sense? He doesn’t say?
So, now, we are being lofted into another ‘dimension of reality’. Now that really is a puzzle. What would it be like to go into another dimension of reality? What does that even mean? It’s deeper. What — more profound? A pit, maybe? Like falling off a cliff perhaps? That would be for a few moments a very different dimension than most of us have experienced. And it would strike one, I suppose as really real. The impact of such an experience of depth must be very impressive. As Dr. Johnson said about the man about to be hanged: “It would have the effect of concentrating the mind,” he thought (quoting from memory, I fear, so do not rely upon it). Yes, it would probably seem very real, though more real than anything provided by science? No, I don’t think so. As real perhaps as making a discovery of some significance, but not more real. The advantage of the sceintific discovery is that, in most cases, the person experiencing it has longer to enjoy it.
So, yes, I can see where surrendering oneself completely and jumping off a cliff might give someone the experiences that John Haught is thinking about. But that’s really the only experience that I can think of that really fills the bill. I think that’s what he must be talking about. Because even self-surrender works. You would be surrendering yourself to the elements, giving of yourself completely. I don’t know about the dimension of reality, but I can well think that hurtling through the air towards you imminent demise would at least give you a new sense of the urgent reality of life. Yes, I’m sure of it. That’s what he has in mind. Couldn’t be anything else. Jumped off a cliff, poor guy! Imagined it anyway.
Utter bilge. My reaction to this kind of fluffy tripe is to say that, if whichever god it is you subscribe to is capable of engendering such ‘universal love’, how is it possible for atheists to exist at all? After all, that’s what universal means. If the god these waffling twerps keep insisting is real did exist, it wouldn’t actually be possible for us to not believe in him.
Still, it’s good to have someone who at least doesn’t pretend there’s any kind of rational/intellectual defence for faith.
Yes. Thank you for this. You see it too.
Whenever I read ‘explanations’ and descriptions of this kind — and there are plenty out there — the image that comes to my mind is that of an infant opening their mouth for the breast. I have a vague memory — or think I have a vague memory — of being wet and hungry and alone and crying, and then suddenly comfort and warmth and a bliss bliss bliss of sucking so that everything melts into a content-less contentment. Safe. This is where things belong. It is fulfillment at its most primal level, one that comes even before a hard sense of self. Mommy and I and the bottle are One and Everything.
I’ve always suspected that mystical experiences are re-experienced aspects of this state — and mystics then draw profound lessons from them about the ultimate nature and goal of reality, instead of recognizing that this limp state is a leftover from infancy.
Eric MacDonald #19 wrote:
In addition to sucking on a bottle, you might also consider the analogous experience of a really good orgasm. St Theresa’s descriptions of her merging with God are practically erotica.
Is theology peer-reviewed? If so, I’d like to know how
Is verified by other theological scholars, and how it’s tested. Get back to me when you get the data and results, and some nice graphs.
“John Haught says, in God and the New Atheism, that gnu atheists get faith all wrong, at least from the point of view of theology”
Well of course we do since we don’t accept “faith” (at least not the religious kind) or theology as having any validity.
“thinks of faith as a state of self-surrender in which one’s whole being, and not just the intellect, is experienced as being carried away into a dimension of reality that is much deeper and more real than anything that can be grasped by science and reason.”
Lord liftin’ jasus bye, it’s karen armstrong in disguise!!
Is this the “sophisticated” theology we hear so much about? I mean, is what Ophelia quoted really representative of the “sophisticated arguments and serious theology” with which the new atheists have supposedly been avoiding engagement?
And they wonder why we mock theology!
Seriously, this is Deepak Chopra stuff.
“…if the universe is encompassed by an infinite Love, would the encounter with this ultimate reality require anything less than a posture of receptivity and readiness to surrender to its embrace?”
Unfortunately the universe seems to be encompassed by an infinite indifference rather than infinite love. Just saying…
Andy wrote:
Indeed, it’s more of the gag-inducing rubbish we refer to as other ways of knowing [jazz hands!] – pretty much essentially what this debate (if you can call it that) comes down to. Sadly (for them) managing to explain in detail – with anything resembling coherence – is something none of them, neither god-woo peddler (like Haught) or woo-woo peddler (like Chopra) has ever achieved.
Yes, this is my favorite part:
That’s the essence of Chopraism. You must completely divorce your intellect from the “spiritual” experience. If, at any point, you try to activate your intellect—by asking a rational question, or by wondering out loud whether there’s any evidence for this spirituality stuff—then you are doing it wrong, and you are corrupting the experience. Don’t think. No rational thought allowed. It gets in the way of having a “true experience.” What a racket!
I prefer the good old-fashioned way of saying this:
Much more direct and to the point, without all of this modern waffling.
Andy:
“these effects are not the reason we meditate”
Buddha
@ Hamilton Jacobi,
My, Martin Luther was a piece of work. He reasons how to hate reason, got to hand it to him, it’s great theology but rubbish philosophy. Personally, I blame the parents…
This is a teachable skill. Occasionally, while playing tai chi, there are interesting moments. Western practices have too much baggage to deal with for most people to ever experience where Eastern practices lead. Much less magical thinking to be stripped away.
About the sophisticated question – I wonder that too. This book is definitely written for a general audience, so it’s not “technical” theology, if there is such a thing – but I really don’t know if the slushy stuff is acceptable in “technical” theology. I really don’t know if he could just recycle “being carried away into a dimension of reality that is much deeper and more real than anything that can be grasped by science and reason” for a theology journal. Haught has written theology books, but how different the style is from this one, I don’t know. I should take a look at one. Haven’t done that yet.
Asserted without evidence? Hell, asserted without coherence. Seems as good a context as any for recollection of the great Hitchens kōan.
Drdave:
There are many ways to cause experiences like those described by you and others. They are teachable skills in the sense that you can tell people what to do and they can experience the same the same thing.
The problem is not the experience or the technique. It’s the conclusions they draw by making shit up. It’s the explanations they make up with no sign of experimentation or use of reason. That’s the problem(s).
An infinite, all-encompassing love couldn’t mean anything to me. I’d find it about as important to my existence as cosmic rays or inertia; necessary but uninvolving. Love is so moving to me because it’s such a unique, variable, evolving thing, and it can be lost, and will be eventually.
“Western practices have too much baggage to deal with for most people to ever experience where Eastern practices lead. Much less magical thinking to be stripped away.”
I live in China and I have to say, I disagree. Magical thinking is ridiculously omnipresent here; even well-educated people almost always believe in a certain amount of woo (or should I say wu).
What I want to know is, what distinguishes Sophisticated Theology from the low-hanging fruit that we new atheists are always accused of picking?
Haught has said (in a discussion with he, Dennett, and D.S. Wilson, which is on YouTube) that we gnus focus on the unsophisticated stuff, without ever attending to the (ostensibly) heady stuff written by learned Theologians. Truth is, there’s nothing in contemporary theology that would necessarily compel gnu atheists to modify their critiques. It’s all updated C.S. Lewis (the better stuff, anyway). It’s one big bluff, folks. These super-awesome arguments that are rumored to be in ST, are basically Godot.
“Why infinite Love? Why not infinite Hate?”
Yes! When I ask ooey-gooey New Agey friends, “Why this assumption that God is infiitely loving and caring? Why isn’t it just as valid to assume he’s a capricious, murderous, hateful jerk?” I tend to receive a nervous laugh and a “Oh-aren’t-you-the-contrarian” look. Nobody’s ever answered the question.
Never, yes I had a similar conversation just the other day — though it was with an atheist, and in a different context. The subject was Pascal’s wager.
Pascal’s wager assumes that there are two options, either we suffer infinite torment in hell or we say a little prayer every so often and avoid hell. But then that presupposes that God is fond of the people who believe in him; it could be that I quicken my damnation through piety. To make matters worse: given the problem of evil, a case can be made to the effect that a God who hates us all more or less equally is more consistent with the evidence than an Abrahamic god is.
Three things remarkable about that. First: we have this unmotivated false dichotomy. Second: that dichotomy is inconsistent with the evidence. Third: even atheists have been led to believe that it holds water. Once this refutation sinks in properly, it is absolutely devastating to one of the theist’s more compelling arguments.
Does Haught name these channels and explain how even one of them leads us to understand and know the world?
I was thinking that a description of science could be as a method that allows us to overcome the subjectivity of personal experience. This is how we come to understand and know.
thinks of faith as a state of self-surrender in which one’s whole being, and not just the intellect, is experienced as being carried away into a dimension of reality that is much deeper and more real than anything that can be grasped by science and reason. [p 13]
Definite rape vibe going on here.
Ah yes, there are many channels we can gain information through… unfortunately I only get basic cable.
Funny how all the preachers want me to pay for their service package.
Camshaft rose serial love towards appointment upside unable because print version feedback outside.
It makes as much sense as John Haught’s twaddle.
Sastra said, after noting my suggestion that perhaps Haught is talking about jumping off a cliff — which was meant as a joke, by the way — a reductio if you like — that the other possibility is an orgasm. And of course sexual imagery in mysticism is pervasive. In fact, Don Cupitt points out that male mystics seem to know more about female sexuality than they should (hence not, in Bruce Gorton’s sense, rape vibe, but the experience of being raped, and surrendering to the violation and finding it an expression of love, infinite love, even), since men use the imagery of surrender, penetration, etc., as they imagine women to experience sexual ecstasy. (Indeed, Bernini’s famous statue of St. Theresa is surely the image of a woman experiencing orgasm.) But my jumping off the cliff suggestion was meant as a joke. Haught’s description of whatever it is is silly and childish, as Ophelia says.
But Haught’s language would not be out of place in “sophisticated theology.” Andy’s question about the distinction between sophisticated theology and the low hanging fruit that the new atheists are accused of picking is a good one. If you dip at random into theological texts you will come upon language which is as woolly and meaningless as Haught’s attempt to describe a religious experience. For example, opening a volume of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics randomly, I came upon this passage:
I quote at some length, not to bore you, but so that you can see that it doesn’t get better as we move along, but sinks further and further into meaninglessness. What we see is hermeneutic as the willed ‘speaking further’ of the Word to the world in later ages and stages, through the theologian, that is, but with the full intention of the Word. There is an incredibly complex, but largely meaningless, expansion of the meaning of what was first ‘revealed’ (written by men at the beginning of the tradition in the scriptures now collected and made canonical and sacred), and all of this, the original words on paper, and the later expansions of this hermeutically, are, in some sense, to be thought to be purposed in the original communication.
Theology is a deeply compromised intellectual pursuit. It has to assume, within the original text, a communication from beyond, from another dimension of reality, a communication which is both immanent in the world, that is, as a human product, but also, in some sense, and without possibility of confirmation, an objective glimpse into another dimension of reality, signified here by the the word ‘word’, but with a capital ‘W’, hence, Word.
I shan’t carry this futher, but I hope you can get the point. Theology is an impossible activity, because it presumes to speak of that which cannot be spoken of — Karen Armstrong is at least right about this. And since it cannot be spoken of, it cannot be said to exist in any sense of that word. But theologians and religionists of all stripes, even if they take this point of view (which most believers do not), end up trying to express everything in terms of religious experience, but this, quite plainly, is purely immanent, and has no clear reference to anything in another dimension of reality. I have suggested, in another thread, that perhaps we have to leave it at that, and tell believers that they are free to try to come up with evidence that shows that some of these experiences are veridical. I do not think they can, but they should be free to try. My own guess is that what we already know about consciousness and its dependence on the brain means that this attempt is bound to be frustrated, for any religious experience must be, in some sense, associated with a brain state, and this is inevitably a reductive explanation of the experience, which cannot escape the bounds of the brain and its associated mental states unless there is some correlate in the physical or material world which can be empirically verified.
There is an awful lot of meaningless language in philosophy, literary theory, postmodernism, and so on. Of course you have to read an awful lot of texts to pick up on the jargon, so as to understand the context of the language so you can join in the game. This is self-referential scholarly game playing and this gives them a sense of superiority, as much as a orthodox Jew has a sense of superiority when it comes to studying the Torah or Tanakh.
But when it comes to discussing subjects outside this game, then the naivety and lack of understanding about how the real world works begins to shine. Theologians want you to come and play their game but won’t come and play the game of reality as known by science.
EM: perhaps Haught is talking about jumping off a cliff — which was meant as a joke, by the way — a reductio if you like Why reductio? He is talking about jumping off a cliff. Every moment of every day are actions based on insufficient knowledge, often in the face of reason. Of course — that’s trivial for anyone who isn’t “babyish”. The problem isn’t Haught’s point — the problem is that there’s no reason to make a big deal out of it, to turn it into an intellectual construct. It’s precisely the end of intellect — which means it’s incredibly stupid to try to turn it into an intellectual construct beyond the mere recognition that reason is only a tiny bit of our lives. The babies argue over it. The adults recognize it and move on.In short — if faith is the ability to act in the face of ignorance, to even revel in irrationality, well then, it’s nothing at all since we all must act in that way. It’s trivial and silly to discuss it unless you’re drunk, high or walking through the rain in the forest. It’s like trying to build a philosophy on the fact that most people have ten toes. (Oh my God!! It’s a universal truth!!!)
…then that F1 tornado that came through our neighborhood a couple of months ago was just a “love bite”.
(For those wondering: there was no serious injury or property loss. The maple in front of our house is just a bit lopsided now.)
Eric
but the experience of being raped, and surrendering to the violation and finding it an expression of love, infinite love, even
That is where I am getting the whole rape vibe from – its the sort of thing that you can see a rapist imagining is going to happen with the victim.
It is downright creepy.
We have a local Christian apparel company called NOTW http://www.notw.com/ “not of this world” from the Gospel of John. The decals are all over cars here in Southern California. The new one I saw is “Obey Pray Trust NOTW”. Seems to fit right in with this.
Thank you Bruce. Yes, it is downright creepy. Now that I see the context that you had in mind, it is very creepy indeed, as creepy as I felt when I wrote the words you quoted.
But, of course, if you think about it, when you say of any putative god who may have created this universe, that it is good, you are accepting all the horrors of it, and are, then, effectively, consenting to be “fucked.” Because life, on the whole, I think, tends to go badly, and often very badly. There may be moments of joy and wonder, but most people have very few such moments. That was part of the genius of Darwin’s theory, for it explains precisely why things have a tendency to go badly. It’s not about goodness or badness, but merely about an indifferent process that brings us into being and then, in the end, crushes us. So, gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
Sastra:
Indeed. (Or he’s been smoking something naughty.) There seems to be a strong element of autoerotic fantasy in mystical writing. An even more disturbingly extreme example than Teresa is Gemma Galgani, who seems to have been genuinely unhinged – having been, almost certainly, a victim of sexual abuse (by a female servant, according to her, and possibly also by male family members, given some aspects of her behaviour) in childhood.
Yes, yes, same old “other ways of knowing” bullshit. Which I will continue to reject until anyone can show me their “way of knowing” can be used by the believer and non-believer alike to distinguish between true and false knowledge with any degree of regularity. Funny how they all fail at that.
This is all I heard from Haught:
Next time someone sees him, they need to ask “could I buy some pot from you?”
That sounds very much like what Dan Dennett calls a “Deepity”. His use of that term is somewhat more specific and involves Use Mention Errors, but I think it could be broadened a little to accomodate this kind of vacuous description as well without overly diluting the meaning of “deepity” (*love* that word:))
Long time reading, first time commenting–thank you Ms. Benson for your wonderful forthright posts.
Thanks back, YM! And now that you’ve started, keep commenting.
“… is indistinguishable from a state of self-deception …”. Thank you Ophelia, for this idea. It got me thinking along some new lines. Because it’s indistinguishable doesn’t mean it’s not ultmately different, just that Occam’s razor applies.
BTW, I was educated in Catholic schools in the 60s and we had the same science classes as the public schools. I never heard a teacher say that we should give up reason, even in Religion classes. I do recall being told that God gave us brains for a reason and we were obligated to use them.
I also remember a science teacher telling us that evolution is God’s tool for creating life and at some unknown point God “breathed a soul” into a proto-human and that was “Adam”. No conflict with science there.
In my case the Catholic upbringing didn’t stick, but I still look back on it with some fondness.
It’s assertions pretty much all the way down…
A deeper dimension of reality. Yeahhhhh, man, I get it. It’s like, what if we’re all just, like, ephemeral phenomena projected from a numinous all-encompassing superdimension? Even if we are, man, you totally bogarted my bowl there. You holdin’?
Infinite submission leads to infinite trust, which leads to you opening your finite bank account to the infinite greed of the clergy. It’s all part of the plan.
Pretty-coloured words can persuade. You can use them to persuade yourself, and you very much hope that your wonderful book will persuade your readers. Because that will justify it all, and prove that you are right. The more people who can be persuaded, the brighter and prettier the colours will seem to be. But of course, you don’t depend on that really. You’re only publishing your book in order to share the truth. Naturally.
Soon, the words are so pretty and bright that you can say they are “true”: don’t ask how, it’s just a feeling, but it’s a much truer feeling than all those people’s science and reason. Because it’s so pretty it must be true; it has to be true; so it is true. Obviously.
And this is it, the core, the kernel: having a good trip. Giving yourself a good time. Let self-indulgence be “self-surrender”. Feeling good, a fantastic experience. And the better it feels, the truer it is, of course… How can it feel so good and not be true? How can I imagine anything so fantastic which isn’t…
Oh shit! Oh Jesus wept!
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