Like the Force, but without the lightsabers
Jerry has a post (how does he do it while on the road admiring the beauties of Banff?) about a reader who reports on one path out of theism, from the literal kind to “the ground of all being” to the gleaming port of gnu atheism. I seized the opportunity to ask this reader what that meant to her/him, explaining that I always wonder what people mean by it. The answer was both informative and amusing.
When I was in the “ground of all being” stage, I thought of it as a representation of some mystical spiritual energy which imbued the universe with intelligence and purpose. Looking back, they were basically filler words to represent a concept I didn’t want to think about too deeply for fear of losing the sense of community I found in the church. When I did eventually begin to think about it honestly, I realized it sounded a lot like the Force from Star Wars, but without the cool lightsabers (I still want one of those).
I don’t know what authors like Tillich and Spong really mean by it, even after reading four or five of Spong’s books. I guess that’s why it was such a short hop to reading The God Delusion and thinking, “This makes so much more sense!”
Helpful.
Excellent. This backs the ‘supernatural is meaningless’ position. It’s just filler-words and wishful thinking.
The peculiar thing is that they still use the word God for this, for backward compatibility. A word that can mean anything means nothing.
I can relate when he/she describes “the ground of all being” as “a representation of some mystical spiritual energy which imbued the universe with intelligence and purpose.”
I used to see God in that way before I became an atheist, but I arrived there in a more New Age way (combined with lots of reggae music).
This pretty much mirrors my path away from theism. It’s hard now to understand what I thought then, but I remember going through a long “spiritual, but not religious” and “life force and energy infusing the universe” stage. I was brought up a Catholic in a very mixed, multi-cultural area of England. I remember quite early on realising the constant mantra of Respect All Religions didn’t really work. Only one can really be right. This, plus fully understanding what Catholics were actually supposed to believe, as opposed to what most of them practice and do believe, led me want to believe in some sort of ineffable divine force type thing – I wouldn’t have called myself a theist as I really didn’t think I believed in god(s). Maybe vaguely Taoist/ Buddhist, without bothering to learn too much about them
It’s easy now to look back and see it as some sort of station on the inevitable journey towards atheism, but more and more people in the West seem to stay there. At least in Europe, and it seems increasingly in America, this sort of wishy-washy, good force, spiritual energy type nonsense is pretty much the norm for a long of people.
I can also relate to the above.
My parents are definitely of the more sophisticated/wooly/liberal/left variety aka Australian Anglicans (although that does depend also on the diocese), and I certainly had a very woolly conception of God. But I think the idea of there being “something out there” is very much the default answer if you just don’t know when you’re younger. I can certainly remember having discussions with my best mate where we would broach these “big questions” and the wooly answers would always come out. Largely, I think, because the alternatives require some more thought (whether I would “blame” this on my not very religious upbringing is another matter).
Bringing it back to religion: There’s a whole raft of ideas, words and assumptions that go along with even the nicest versions of religion and it can be hard to disentangle them all. (Eric Mac’s writing on the word diginity and it’s use with regards to human life have been tough, informative and probably transformative for me, as I try and muddle my way through what the church of my parents and a good many family friends actually believes in and stands for.)
I think of a lot of the forum discussion I’ve had on the subject and one of the theists, in particular, had a real habit of asking rhetorical questions like: Do you not think forgiveness is a good thing? And looking from the outside in, I think people who are “on the fence” with religion, tend to skim “read” compassion, morality, forgiveness and just associate it with religion, and belief. And of course that leads to the unspoken assumption that if you’re not religious you are not compassionate, moral or forgiving. (Although not always, I reckon there’s possibly just an assumption that because they are talking about “good things” that the religious method is just one of many and the moderate religious get kudos for just having a crack.)
Ghah, more to say, and have to go.
I love this! I’ll take every opportunity to use this in debates with the Harvard Divinity School “Christians” – they are ALL into this “ground of being” crap and it pisses me the hell off!
I had a very similar experience reading Spong’s books on the way out of Christianity. He does an excellent critique of the problems with classical Christian beliefs, but then his solution of Tillich’s ground of all being just never made any sense to me. It wasn’t a solution to anything, it was just a way to dodge the need to accept what the evidence points to. I couldn’t allow myself to continue that path with real honesty.
My background is in electronics, ground actually means something when I usually hear it. It’s just so rare that these wooly buggers use it in a way that I can recognize. Nine to five, weekdays, I hear it and ambiguity vanishes. It’s a conceptual anchor. But if it pops up in conversation away from a professional environment my conceptual anchor too often becomes a helium balloon on the breeze.
It’s a shame. Perfectly woody word. Not tinny at all.
“…reading Spong’s book on the way out of Christianity” – Spong is a clever man, a decent writer, and an engaging speaker, who appears to have very strong faith in….whatever it is that he has faith in. So when one has slid down the proverbial slippery slope and is now over one’s head in the pool of atheism, it’s tempting to grap onto Spong, hoping to find something to hold on to. Except, as it turns out, there is no “there” there.
While waiting in the Principal’s outer office for my mother to come get me at grade 7 Catholic school (I wasn’t in trouble, I’d strained a tendon playing softball at lunchtime) I came across a book of poems titled, “Are you running with me, Jesus?” Author and publisher long forgotten.
The author wrote a poem in which he posited that God was involved with the most trivial details of life, all life, everywhere, and that life kept going on, and on, and on, only because of God. That concept of God carried me through my Catholic high school education, and only started to be questionable when I was introduced to non-Catholic believers whose conviction that the literal truth of the Bible was unquestioned. I questioned. I also questioned my own belief in a God who Kept Things Going, and found my way ultimately to atheism.
I have to add that the notion that there is only one true path to God created problems for me. I began to see cracks in the wall. That pushed me further away from Christianity. My mother had left Christianity before me (and I followed her lead), but one of our relatives pointed out that my mother was probably going to go to hell, and I would too, if I didn’t return to the faith.
That’s when I realized that this is not my God. God is supposed to be good and loving, so he would never allow my mom to go to hell (or me) simply for not believing in him.
It was the love of Mom vs the love of God, and Mom won out. Thanks, Mom!
It helped that Mom was real, and I saw her every day. God, no so much.
At that point, I think it’s no longer theism, it’s something much closer to a sort of pantheism or even deism. Which is basically an entirely different animal I think.
As a side note, it’s really something that is entirely incompatible with Christianity and other monotheistic religions, for what it’s worth.
Karmakin, indeed – it’s a very inert sort of god, that makes no demands on humans. That’s one reason (cf James above) it’s so infuriating when theists use it to shield the non-inert god. It’s not even a “god” – so why protect the one as if it were continuous with the other? Cheat. Cheat cheat cheaty cheat.
This is even funnier for me because I can trace my atheism to the Star Wars movies. I was only 2 or 3 when the first one came out and my parents took me to see it. Despite my young age I was apparently taken with the movie and it funneled into an interest in astronomy. Later, around the release of Return of the Jedi, I read an interview with Lucas about the various influences that went into the movies where he mentioned mythology. I know now that he was talking about Joseph Campbell mythology but my 9 year old self didn’t. Instead, through astronomy, I knew a little about Greco- Roman myths and went with that.
It wasn’t long after studying the myths and legends of different cultures that I began seeing similarities to my own Christian upbringing. Having been told all my life that these other faiths were false, yet now seeing that arguements used to prop up my own religion could easily be applied else where, I began to question Christianity. After rejecting Christianity I looked to other, mostly eastern, religions and had an embarassingly long New Age period. When all those inevitably fell apart for the same reasons I tried to go with “spiritual but not religious” and “all paths are right in their own way” but that didn’t last too long. Really I was doing eveything I could to avoid saying what was really in my head.
Finally, one night, I was walking my dog and the sky was really clear. I looked up and realized or admitted that everything simply made more sense without all the mysticism. I had spent years trying to hammer in god and the supernatural into everything only for it to end up in a confused mess. In the end the only reason I could think of to continue believing in all of it was nothing more than ignorance, my own and humanities, but I knew that basing something on that would be just another acknowledgment that I had no real reason to believe.
“Karmakin, indeed – it’s a very inert sort of god, that makes no demands on humans.”
Beside the point! The God of Tillich and Spong is a Silly Putty god, ready to meet demands, not make them. Easily stretched and twisted into any shape they fancy, picking up the image of whatever they press it against. And it comes in a colorful plastic egg! “God” perfected for His true purpose, the only purpose He ever had.
Back when I was still reading a lot of Spong, not quite ready to ditch the vestiges of my faith, I’d get to the end of whatever he was arguing , deconstructing as he did the vagaries of dogma, and I’d say, ‘ok, bishop, what’s next?’ He seemed always to get to a spot where the extension of his line of argument seemed obvious to me, then back off or just stop. I soon got tired of that, and simply extended the argument myself – whereupon I no longer bothered to read Spong.
That’s a great account, Jeremy.
(Somebody should be keeping a master list of these – Convert’s Corner and all the others that turn up at PZ’s, Jerry’s, etc. Greta probably has lots.)
At one point in my life I considered myself a Transcendentalist. That ended I think when I slowly began to realize that all the profound and eloquent deepities were felt more than understood — and that this was not necessarily a positive feature in a world view, but — possibly — a malevolent bug. More often than not you can switch around the words in a brilliant passage and lose none of the meaning. Should you be able to do that? And at some point you start to wonder why people who worship the mystery of the spirit seem to have so damn much to say about the Unknowable. How do they know?
What happens I think is that our brain-generated internal minds interpret external objects and events as if they are part of the inner narrative flow — and the cosmos becomes like a giant Mind itself. It’s all continuous, all connected. When you’re thinking of a song and it suddenly plays on the radio, there’s an automatic sensation of power: this, because of you. Maybe your memory was the direct cause; maybe you’re simply the focus of a higher power trying to tell you something or direct you somewhere; maybe you and the universe are all part of the same intentionality, manifesting in various ways. At the root of all supernatural thinking lies the conviction that thoughts are forces — and mind is the ground of being.
That’s what the Ground of Being is: the Mind. The confusion of self and other. We’re filtering everything through the example of our awareness and concluding we’re making a discovery about the nature of reality, instead of a discovery about the habits of perception.
Jeremy Shaffer wrote:
At least one prominent skeptic has pointed out that Star Wars can be used to debunk the idea that there is such a force at work in the real universe. In the story, the existence of the Force is never in any real doubt. You can clearly see its effects, study it, use it — and it is all obvious on an intersubjective level. Those few who voice skepticism quickly find themselves strangled by the very thing they were trying to deny. Only a total moron would insist that there is no such thing as the Force.
In the Star Wars universe. Which looks nothing like ours, in that way. Fiction thus provides us with a reasonable scenario predicting what one would naturally expect, IF the Force exists. Someone who walks into the movie already believing that yes, there is a mystical force of energy binding the universe together and imbuing it with intelligence and purpose might be able to see confirmation of their view — at first. And then you wonder … hmmm. Why then isn’t real life more like Star Wars?
If we are talking conversions, I used to be an atheist dualist for many years. I read the work of David Chalmers, a well-known proponent of physical dualism. Far from supporting my belief, his work convinced me that dualism made no sense at all. From that point on I have been a materialist.
Steve Zara:
Mark Fournier:
I can see why you guys would say this, but I think it’s deeply and importantly wrong.
I think this is something that atheists do frequently get wrong about religious concepts, in a way that religious people can sense but generally can’t articulate. (Or don’t want to.)
The analogy to The Force isn’t just funny—it’s funny because it’s so true—it captures something basic and important about what it means for something to be an appropriate object of religious devotion, or to be supernatural, or to be the kind of thing anybody might call God.
That’s no accident, and IMO the best thing Lucas came up with for Star Wars. He came up with something that everybody intuitively recognizes as the kind of thing you could have a religion about, which you could sorta worship, or at least revere in a religious sense—and which resembles a lot of New Agey, Eastern, and even ancient Western ideas of God. (Like Plato’s ultimate Form of The Good.)
When you watch Star Wars, you quickly pick up on the fact that The Force is not really like a force or energy or vibration as scientists understand those things, but is very much like the kind of mysterious religious concept that a New Ager would call a force or energy or vibration–or might call God. You draw a lot of inferences unconsciously, and it makes intuitive sense that the Force is mysterious in the religious sense, not just a scientific sense, for reasons it’s difficult to put your finger on consciously.
Think about Obi-Wan saying Use The Force, Luke. You know without being told that if The Force is real, and if Luke “gets it,” that Luke will never, ever say “I used The fucking Force, Obi-Wan, but the Force fucked up.”
The Force doesn’t fuck up. If Luke tries to use The Force, and Luke fails, it’s not The Force’s fault. Luke may have fucked up—maybe Luke didn’t use The Force correctly, with the proper intention, attitude, and skill, but The Force itself didn’t fuck up, and isn’t fucked up. It’s The Force, and it doesn’t make sense to talk about The Force fucking up or even being fucked up.
The Force is entirely reliable, even perfect in its own peculiar way. It is exactly what it’s supposed to be, by its very nature. It isn’t an approximation, isn’t a noisy channel of information, isn’t a heuristic, and isn’t a complicated, fallible machine. It’s The Force, and it has (or is) a perfect, irreducible essence, which is to be The Force.
Not coincidentally, the essence of the Force is profoundly and very directly related to important things. The Force isn’t good or bad—it has a light side and a dark side—but it is all about good and bad, and truth and falsity, and skill and ineptness. It “knows” what’s good or bad, and what’s true or false, and what will work and what won’t. (You might be confused as to whether you’re on the light side or the dark side, and unknowingly get sucked into the dark side, but The Force itself isn’t confused at all, not even a little bit. It just knows, because its essence is to know that shit.)
The Force is a whole lot like a lot of religious entities, like Luck, Fate, Chi, Karma, or Plato’s supreme Form of The Good, or Teilhard de Chardin’s teleological whatsit that inexorably tends toward the Omega Point. It’s somehow essentially bound up in the structure of reality and is very much about some kind of truth involving values or goals.
I think that’s very revealing, and it’s right in line with what Pascal Boyer and Richard Carrier say about supernaturalism, and what makes a concept supernaturalist.
Pervasive supernatural entities people are prone to calling God always have a certain key feature based on certain key unconscious assumptions.
It’s always assumed that there’s an essence of something-like-a-mind even if it’s overtly denied that it’s anything like a mind at all. It’s always something that can know, or tend toward a goal.
And it’s always very, very good at it, because it has an essence that just does that, or just is that, or at any rate is fairly directly and profoundly connected to that.
Dualism in some form is always implicitly assumed—it’s assumed that mind or mental properties are basic, and not reducible to patterns of matter and material properties. Mind comes before matter, or matter is imbued with irreducibly mental or teleological properties.
Awesome supernatural entities are generally very reliable in themselves because they are basic and direct. A love goddess
The Force is like a force or energy or vibration in an important intuitive sense—it’s basic and fundamental, not reducible to complicated fallible material mechanisms. It’s also unlike a force or energy or vibration in another important intuitive sense—it’s mental. And it’s only intuitively plausible that the Force is powerful because people believe in mind-over-matter in some sense. Pure mind, or an essence of a mental property, has power over matter at a fundamental level.
That is also why people can believe in a creator God that is The Creative Force, or a God that is The Logos—they can only believe that sort of thing because they don’t accept that mind necessarily reduces to matter, and can’t be temporally or metaphysically prior to matter.
In light of science, we know that the idea of free-floating mental or teleological properties is incoherent—it turns out that minds, and mental phenomena like truth or justice or love, are intrinsically complicated.
The ultimate-ground-of-being idea is often a way of talking about what philosophers call supervenience, which is basically the made-out-of relation. Theologians often confuse the matter by calling supervenience a kind of causation, which it isn’t in the modern sense of “causation.”
For example, consider pool balls on a pool table, with the balls made of molecules of plastic and the table made out of molecules of other materials, and those molecules in turn being made out of atoms which are made out of subatomic particles and so on.
The existence of the balls supervenes on the existence of their molecules, and the motion of the balls supervenes on the motion of those molecules. The molecules and their motion are the ground of being of the balls and their motions—without the molecules, you don’t have the balls, and without the molecules moving, the balls don’t roll and bounce off of each other.
Theologians often talk about this dependency as a causation relationship, with the existence of the molecules causing the existence of the balls, and their motion causing the balls’ motion. That’s in line with archaic uses of “causation” (e.g., Aristotle’s “formal cause”), but it’s terribly confusing. It’s a dependency relation, but not a causal one. The balls aren’t caused by the molecules, they’re the same thing as their molecules, described at a different level of abstraction. Likewise, the motion of the balls is not caused by the motion of the molecules; those are alternative descriptions of the very same phenomena, at different levels.
We (and theologians) can say that the molecules and their motion are metaphysically prior to the balls and their motion—conceptually, the molecules and their motions “come first” and enable the existence of the pool balls and their motions.
That’s not a temporal before-and-after relation, which is convenient if you want to talk about God being timeless but still talk misleadingly about God “causing” things. (E.g., to make a non-temporal version of the First Cause argument.)
A common theological move is to talk about this sort of ground-of-being (supervenience) thing, and assert that the ultimate ground of being is God. If you follow all the “formal cause” dependencies back far enough, you get to a special uncaused thing, and that’s God.
If we clearly understand grounds of being as supervenes-on relationships—which theologians generally don’t want you do do—then we realize that it’s a made-out-of relationship. The ultimate ground of being is whatever the lowest-level thing is, that everything else is made out of. It’s the ultimate reality, and it’s basically what physicists are looking for when they try to come up with a Theory of Everything. (That may be one reason why physicists annoyingly toss the term “God” around in a confusing way.)
One big problem for theism here is that the ultimate ground of being isn’t a separate thing from all the stuff we see; it’s the same stuff, described at the lowest possible level. Asserting that it’s God isn’t an assertion of theism—it’s an assertion of pantheism. God is just whatever everything turns out to be made of.
That is fine with a lot of fuzzyheaded new agers, transcendentalists, and heterodox theologians, but there’s a hitch.
People can only find such a thing Godlike, and feel religious reverence for it, if they assume that it is something like a mind, or essentially imbued with mental properties, like Truth, Justice, Love, Creativity, or some kind of directedness.
If the ultimate ground of being turns out to be mindless branes of vibrating strings and whatnot, or a fractal manifold of spacetime whatsits, that’s not God. There’s no knowledge, truth, justice, love, or directedness there, and it just doesn’t have the kind of human meaning humans care about when they worship something.
You can be awed by that sort of thing, but not in a religious way, because its not supernatural—there’s no irreducible magical essence of anything interesting there.
The ability to believe in such a thing and feel right calling it God always depends on assuming that humanly interesting things go all the way down. (With bonus points if the uninteresting things like strings and quarks and atoms spring from an irreducibly mental essence of supernatural creativity or directedness, i.e., the Mind Force that Is God “creates” the physical world in some sense.)
This kind of problem plagues all religion that I know of, even Karen Armstrong’s supposedly science-compatible apophatic theology, which is supposedly about practice, not belief. (Religion is supposed to be something you do, and is about knowing-how, not knowing-what, and is therefore entirely compatible with scientific knowing-what. It’s allegedly a “way of knowing” how, not a “way of knowing” what, and basically orthogonal to science.) The problem with Armstrong, and with most Eastern mystical religion thats overtly science-compatible, is that it’s just not true. When push comes to shove, it’s implicitly assumed that some form of dualism is true, such that mystics or spiritual adepts or sages can tap into some form of knowledge or skill that can only be supernatural—it bypasses the natural, and fairly taps into Truth or Skill or whatever. You can revere a spiritually adept teacher because that teacher has a spiritual gift that transcends reason but nonetheless—and therefore—delivers Deep Truth that is more reliable than using mere sense data and reason to figure things out the hard way. Somehow, mystics can just get into some state where they bypass fallible human reasoning and skill and more directly access something with a deeper and more direct relation to truth or skill or something—it may take many years of learning and unlearning and practicing and so on, but then they can Use The Force, Luke.
Thanks, Ophelia!
Sastra- I’ve never thought about that before though I have asked many a Christians why miracles once supposedly took the form of waters parting, instantly cured diseases, the dead coming back to life and so forth, as we see in the bible and should expect if it were true, but now only take the form of up- close parking spaces and reasonably priced furniture?
Sastra, interesting point about how the difference between the Star Wars universe and our universe debunks the idea of the Force, and all the rest of this vague mumbo jumbo. Back in my twenties, I had an argument with a guy who was (extreme geek alert!) running a D&D adventure, in which he had an assassin masquerading as a priest, and going through all the motions. He claimed that this was accurate to our own history. My point was that in the D&D universe, the gods were real, so the assassin would never get away with this; it was a fundamentally different metaphysics. Our universe is just not the sort of universe one would expect if the gods were real. The hypothesis of divine existence makes falsifiable predictions.
Another consequence of this is that it makes the attitude of devout Catholics toward the clergy much less mysterious. If God is real, and the Catholic Church is the ‘True Church’, then God would not permit evildoers to minister to his flock. This is what makes the pedophilia scandal in the church so damaging. It actually falsifies their theology.
Paul W. #20 wrote:
Exactly: ‘sophisticated’ theology — and the “God” that atheists are said not to understand — often turns out to be some form of idealistic monism (an idea which is not new, but all too often presented as if it was quite daring.) Theists will often insist that no, no — they’ve rejected dualism and supernaturalism. The God they understand is perfectly compatible with science… a compatibility which only holds true as long as science remembers to be ‘holistic’ and not leave out the significance of mind. But as Carrier (and you and I and many others) have argued over and over, supernaturalism is best defined metaphysically, as Pure Mind (or mind products) existing prior to/supervening on physical matter: the mental cannot be reduced to the non-mental. As you say, we’re dealing with essences.
I think you’ve done a brilliant job relating all this to the Force in Star Wars, and pointing out the fact that it’s absolutely critical that the Force just can’t make a mistake. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Yet another one of your usual excellent comments.
Mark Fournier #22 wrote:
On the same note, I’ve often wondered why horror movies which depict the paranormal/supernatural as real don’t seem to undermine popular belief in ghosts, psychic powers, and so forth. Once again, those phenomenon leave evidence so clear and obvious that any skeptics inserted into the plot are shown to be blindly stumbling into denial so deep they suffer serious consequences. Our universe then is just not the sort of universe one would expect if ghosts/psychic powers/magic or whatever was real.
I suspect believers watch and think to themselves “soon.” Soon all this will be revealed — and I will have known it all along.
I’m afraid I can’t see how your post relates to my comment. My comment was a reaction to the words:
“Looking back, they were basically filler words to represent a concept I didn’t want to think about too deeply”
and what those words revealed about an attitude to the supernatural.
“My point was that in the D&D universe, the gods were real, so the assassin would never get away with this; it was a fundamentally different metaphysics.”
Totally off topic but depending on the deity your DM might have had a point. Pelor’s Church went through a lot of inner purgings when several Clerics were found to be murdering arcane spellcasters without losing any of their divine class features.
Mark Fournier #22 wrote:
No, it goes like this: If God is real, and the Catholic Church is the ‘True Church,’ then God would want his flock to remain loyal to his Church even under difficult circumstances, surviving evils that would make the less committed waver. Evildoer priests then are a test for the faithful — not a test of the theology. The hypothesis of divine existence isn’t going to make quite so easily falsified a prediction when part of the hypothesis involves “sin” and a loyalty oath.
Be careful not to say that quickly.
Hurry up with your blog Paul W!!!! That Force post can go first. Jussayin.
Steve Zara,
I was disagreeing with your saying
This backs the ‘supernatural is meaningless’ position.
I don’t think “supernatural” is meaningless. I think we can clarify what people actually mean by the words “supernatural” and “God,” and they means something distinct that we can show is pretty clearly wrong.
I think thats something a lot of us realize intuitively when we go from being “agnostics” sorta believing some vague kind of dualism/supernaturalism to realizing we’re just atheists, without being able to put our fingers on exactly what changed.
We are just going to have to disagree! I think there are important aspects of the supernatural, and belief in the supernatural, that, say, a “Force”-like phenomenon would not possess. If the Force was an everyday phenomenon, it would not be considered “beyond Nature”. It would be subjected to investigation, to quantification and so on. The very act of doing that would remove any sense of it being miraculous, because miraculous means not everyday.
The reason that the “Force” seems to have a supernatural character is because it’s fictional, because there is a wish for it to be true. That’s a characteristic of supernaturalism – a desire for things to be more than they are. And that is why I believe “supernatural” is meaningless, because it’s unreachable, and deliberately so.
Steve, I think you’re right. Supernatural is composed of wishes and fears (including fictions). The instant any entity or “Force” is hypothesized as real the naturalization of it has begun. It’s just a matter of the way the words and concepts they refer to work. Supernatural and miracle have definite meanings. They are events and things that can’t happen/exist in the world. You can’t get around that, suspend the rules, split the difference, etc.
In addition to the “naturalisation” process you describe, there is another aspect to the concept of the supernatural with is that some supernatural concepts are immune to that naturalisation. The Abrahamic God, for example. I believe that as soon as any being was found to be subject to empirical analysis, it would soon lose its divine status. The Abrahamic God has become an emotional refuge from the vagarities of Nature, the provider of ultimate comfort, the potential forgiver of any and all sins. If God was seen to be “just another chap”, albeit very, very big, he would lose his godliness. So, part of the nature of the Abrahamic God is perpetual mystery, being beyond science and beyond reason. He has to be infinite, because finite just doesn’t cut the mustard. He’s beyond the reach of evidence, because he has to be: there is no point in a god that could be proven false.
That’s my stance on supernaturalism and theism anyway.
That is not something that’s exclusive to the supernatural, though. You wouldn’t say “physics fucked up” or “the mindless branes of vibrating strings fucked up”, either.
Steve,
I think we’re sorta arguing about different things at different levels.
My claim is that supernaturalism is not intrinsically about wish-fulfillment or unfalsifiability.
Basic supernatural ideas in their natural habitat—prescientific societies—make sense to people in much the same way that scientific ideas make sense to scientifically informed people. They believe in dualism because they think they have evidence for it. Mind and matter are obviously very different things, with no obvious necessary connection, so dualism is an inference to the best explanation.
That’s not to say that untestability doesn’t matter in practice, even in unscientific cultures. Dualist/supernaturalist do survive because of the difficulty of testing them, but what’s going on in most believers’ heads is not about untestability. It’s about mind vs. matter and what still seems like the best explanation, for which they have what seems like evidence. In particular, they’re too trusting of their evolved intuitions, largely because evolved intuitions work very well for most things.
For example, they don’t realize that vision is complicated, and astonishingly error-prone in funny cases, because for the most part, they can just look at things, and just see them. Intuitively, it just works, so it seems simple and irreducible, rather than like the end product of an astonishing amount of very complicated information processing, requiring an extremely complicated physical processor.
Similarly, they can just will their bodies to move, and they move. They have no idea that willing is a matter of extremely sophisticated information processing and highly evolved actuators. It seems like mind can just will matter to move, and it just moves.
Evolution equipped us to think about things in those dualistic ways, because it’s simple and it works well, and evolution didn’t understand how it actually works, or have a way of telling us how it actually works. It just equipped us with a set of intuitions for dealing with dumb nonmental, nonteleological matter, and a different set of intuitions for thinking about things with goals and plans. That makes dualism an almost inevitable trap to fall into.
We tend to believe in dualism not because we can’t prove it’s true, but because it seems true, and it’s actually quite difficult to imagine an alternative. (The reality is unexpectedly complicated.) That is how scientists think, too—they have to judge the competing theories that are available, and can only heuristically try to think of the alternatives. Until somebody thinks of a good alternative, they generally default to the best explanation that’s available. Even when an alternative is available, it doesn’t generally get much traction if it seems unduly complicated; only when the complications are shown to be justified does the more complicated system seem like the best explanation, e.g., the simplest explanation of actually complicated facts.
Even in our “scientific” society, the same thing is mostly true, because most people are not scientists and do not know even the basics of the most relevant science. Most unscientific people still believe in dualism for the same positive reasons that prescientific people do—because certain facts about brute matter are obvious, and very different facts about minds are obvious, and it’s very far from obvious how the twain could meet, or why we shouldn’t be surprised if they actually meet in that way.
Basic ideas about the supernatural, and the basic reasons individual people are prone to those ideas, aren’t about unfalsifiability or untestability. They’re about basic categories we think with, and how they seem to work well in world we live in. Dualism is a natural artifact of the way our brains evolved.
The “naturalness” of dualist thinking is important. It’s very much about things we do observe and do experience, and not about abstract possibilities that can’t be proven wrong. It’s all about evidence, or seeming evidence, and is eminently falsifiable in its straightforward, natural form—the form most people believe in, for the reasons they believe in it.
The unfalsifiability of supernaturalist ideas is not an intrinsic property of those ideas—it’s an add-on that takes a straightforward kind of hypothesis and protects it from falsification.
That’s true of most “unfalsifiable” hypotheses. Hypotheses by themselves are generally neither falsifiable or unfalsifiable—they’re just hypotheses.
What makes a hypothesis unfalsifiable is a willingness to throw in complications, revise background assumptions, etc., in order to retain that hypothesis. It’s not generally a local property of the hypothesis itself, but of how attached you are to it.
Basic hypotheses don’t generally make any specific, testable predictions in isolation. They only make testable predictions in combination with other background assumptions. (E.g., Newton’s three laws don’t individually make any testable predictions; you have to use them together to make predictions, and if the predictions aren’t quite right, you don’t know which one is wrong, or whether you’ve just failed to account for some interfering force, or all three are subtly wrong for some deep reason, as Einstein showed.)
When apologists and theologians and accommodationists say that supernatural concepts are unfalsifiable, they’re just wrong, and we should never let them get away with that. Supernatural concepts are as falsifiable as any other explanations, in much the same ways, unless you cheat and make them unfalsifiable by endless question begging and special pleading.
That is a trap that they set for us, and which too many of us fall right into. We should never agree that supernatural means not natural in the sense that science studies the natural world. It doesn’t mean that, and never has, and never will.
You have said that the term “supernatural” is meaningless. I don’t know what you mean by that.
It clearly has meaning, and I think it has a fairly clear meaning, on reflection, even if most people can’t articulate it. (And even if it’s based on unanalyzed intuitions that are ultimately incoherent.) We can figure out what ideas of ghosts and gods and witches and Karma and Luck and The Force have in common, and why they are all wrong.
But maybe you don’t literally mean meaningless—do you mean that the meaning includes or implies things that are incoherent (in the sense of internally contradictory)?
It seems that you mean that the concepts are infinitely malleable—people can revise them willy-nilly, with no useful constraint, such that trying to refute them is like nailing jelly to a tree.
If that’s what you mean, I don’t think it’s right. I think “supernatural” turns out mean something definite to basically everybody in every culture, which they “know when they see it” and can recognize how on reflection—Boyer and Carrier are right that it’s all about irreducible essences of (or with) mental and/or teleological properties. It’s all about the dualism, and it’s reasonably straightforward, and is scientifically debunkable like any other profoundly mistaken idea.
Sure, apologists do treat dualistic/supernaturalist concepts like God as infinitely malleable, because it’s very convenient for not getting caught being obviously mistaken.
That’s not because supernatural concepts themselves are particularly malleable; they’re not. You can bend and twist any concept to avoid losing an argument, if you’re committed enough. (As Lincoln said, you can say that a horse has five legs, if you call a tail a leg, but calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.)
Theologians and apologists pull that shit all the time, and we should stop them right there, and say NO. When they define God as the Ultimate Ground of All Being, we should say NO, that’s not what anybody—even the person saying that—really means by “God.” Nobody actually worships the Ultimate Ground of Being, unless they assume something extra about the UGB that makes it God, or somehow magically worship-worthy. It always turns out to involve some presupposition that comes back to irreducibly mental or teleological essences, or it’s just weird stuff that you can’t worship or earnestly call God, or The Force, or even Luck. (You not only can’t be religious about it, you can’t even be superstitious about it; like quantum mechanics properly understood, it may be “spooky” in a weak sense of being mind-bendingly weird, but it’s just not spooky in the right way.)
I have refined my idea of the supernatural through conversations with philosopher friends and experts in the history of religion and theology. It has been extremely interesting.
There is an awful lot to answer in your post, and I don’t think I could do it justice in a response here, so I’ll probably blog. But just a couple of points for now:
The nature of supernaturalism now is quite different from what it was centuries ago. Supernaturalism has evolved to be malleable not through deliberate intent, but because that is the only way it could survive what science has thrown at it. If we look at how the Catholic Church now deals with faith, we can see the results.
Supernaturalism is meaningless because it is defined as not following the rules of nature, and therefore it is put forever beyond the reach of analysis. Saying that people would recognise supernaturalism when they see it doesn’t work, because there are phenomena that we are familiar with today that were thought to be supernatural, but on analysis turned out not to be (even though they are no less mysterious to most people), such as magnetism. That is a good example of how familiarity removes the ‘super’ of supernaturalism!
Re: The ground of all being
Grendel’s dad mentions the use of the term “ground” in electronics; my impression is that is actually the metaphor being used in “ground of all being”. Please not, though, that I know just about nothing about theology so these are just the impressions I get from talking to people on the internet.
“Ground of all being” (GOAB hereafter) theists seem, for the most part, to be committed substance dualists. That is, they all seem to want to argue that mind, subjective experience, whatever you want to call it SIMPLY CANNOT arise as the result of interactions of “dumb matter” or whatever their particular question-begging phrasing happens to be. That is, the part of you that is definitely you as opposed to those parts of you that could (again, question begging) be implemented as part of an automaton is made of a special kind of stuff.
So GOAB is this metaphor where this soul stuff is moving charges, the electricity; the body is the circuit; and God is the ultimate source of this soul-stuff that makes subjective experience possible in the first place.
Again, this is just the impression I get from arguing with Anthony McCarthy, Verbose Stoic (not to compare them, I’d rather argue with VS for 10,000 years than with McCarthy for 5 minutes) etc. Not to be taken as representative of what it actually means.
@Steve Zara:
Another point that I like to make about this is that “supernatural” explanations are typically something any eight year old with an average explanation could come up with; the really wild explanations that require originality and deep insight are all “natural.” Compare: Mt. Etna’s eruptions are caused by an angry demon imprisoned under the mountain vs. Mt. Etna’s eruptions are caused by the fact that we live on a very thin crust of rock floating on an immense ocean of churning molten metal. One of those sounds made up. The other one sounds TOO CRAZY to be made up.
“Eight year old with an average imagination“
[…] Like the Force, but without the lightsabers – Butterflies and Wheels When I did eventually begin to think about it honestly, I realized it sounded a lot like the Force from Star Wars but without the cool lightsabers (I still want one of those). I don't know what authors like Tillich and Spong really . […]
Dan L.,
I don’t think so. I think its a metaphor starting with the ground you walk on, or erect houses and other structures on, and usually mapping that onto levels of abstraction and supervenience relations—roughly, different senses of the basis for.
The term “ground” in electronics is different. It’s not referring to the literal ground (or “earth” in British electrospeak) as a basis for anything, but as a huge neutral reservoir—an effectively infinite one for most practical purposes, which can absorb large amounts of charge without itself becoming significantly charged—it stays neutral. So a “ground” in the sense of “ground of being” is something more fundamental that you “build on”—it’s relatively lower, and the ultimate ground of being is level zero, with no negative levels below. A ground in the sense of electrical grounding (or earthing) is absolutely neutral—you can tap off any amount of positive or negative charge into it, and it stays neutral.
That’s often not literally true. In some circuits, you can have “grounds” that are not actually neutral, but some fixed reference voltage, and are not actually connected to the earth, and the general trick still works—the ground is always at the reference voltage that counts as zero for that circuit, with other voltages positive or negative relative to that, and that works fine. (Unless you happen to forget, connect a real neutral ground to a non-neutral ground as though they were the same. That tends to release the magic smoke that makes circuits work, and some cases, it can kill you.)
Steve Zara:
I don’t think so. I think it’s exactly what it has been in every culture for thousands of years—an assumption of dualism, with irreducible essences of high-level humanly-interesting entities or properties like Life, Mind, Love, Truth, Justice, Luck, Skill, Goal-Directedness, etc. All of them are basically mental or mind-like. (E.g., teleology that involves magically satisfying goals in a sense that only a mind could actually recognize, though it may be claimed there’s no mind involved—just an inexorable, irreducible tendency like Karma or Fate or Luck.)
Have you read Boyer’s Religion Explained? It’s really worth a read, and IMO the best New Atheist book, even if it’s not pitched that way.
The central idea is that there’s something like a universal grammar of concepts, and certain kinds of combinations of concepts are the ones that we recognize as supernatural.
Boyer (who’s a cognitive anthropologist) claims that his theory accounts for all kinds of superficially very different forms of supernaturalism in every culture ever. That’s a really bold claim, but I think he’s basically right.
I agree, I think, but I think the malleability has preserved the same basic conceptual structures. Supernatural concepts are not infinitely malleable—they still rely on the same crucial intuitions, because those intuitions are what make them work, psychologically, to support religion. If you take the dualist magic out of religious concepts, they don’t inspire religious reverence anymore, so religions do not take the dualist magic out, ever. Instead, they preserve it and play it up when actually doing religion—e.g., inspiring reverence—and obscure it when doing apologetics.
When you really understand what people like Haught and Armstrong are up to, they are very much preserving the crucial dualist intuitions, and exploiting them. They don’t want you to consciously realize that, because it would raise awkward questions, but that is exactly what they’re doing.
I’m not sure what you mean by that. The Catholic church is fully and explicitly dualist.
I’m not sure what you mean by that. If Boyer and Carrier are right about what supernaturalist terms always really mean in the mind of believers, there’s a definite meaning, and it’s only “not following the rules of nature” in the sense that it’s not following the rules of materialist monism—some mental or mind-like (teleological) properties do not reduce to relations among material relations and entities.
Those entities are always assumed to follow rules of a different, basically psychological sort, and generally assumed to do so very strongly—e.g., an essence of Love will not malfunction and make you sneeze or give you hives.
I do agree that if science can explain something, that makes it no longer seem supernatural—if it’s fully explicable in materialist monist terms, it doesn’t have an irreducible mental essence.
That does not mean that the supernatural is just whatever’s beyond the reach of science—it’s very particular kinds of things believed to be inexplicable in normal material terms. Supernatural concepts are constructed in particular ways, and the supernatural isn’t defined as what science can’t study.
It also does not mean that actual supernatural entities are beyond the reach of science—only that some of them are beyond its grasp. If the supernatural exists, science can study it, although if it turns out to be really supernatural, science will hit a wall when it comes to the irreduciblly mental essences.
So, for example, if Venus/Aphrodite existed, we’d probably know by now, although we’d never be able to explain the irreducibly mental essence of Love, or her irreducible knack for manipulating it.
We have already falsified that theory pretty well, by showing that Love is mainly an informational thing—it doesn’t appear to require irreducibly mental substances or attributes.
Science falsifies supernatural concepts all the time by reducing things that were previously assumed to be supernatural to physical relations among physical things. The mind is what the brain does, informationally, so orthodox conceptions of souls are out the window.
I think this supports what I’m actually saying, which maybe I didn’t make clear. I’m not saying people actually recognize supernatural things when they actually see them—I think supernaturalism is false, so I don’t expect that to ever happen.
I’m saying that people can tell the difference between a supernatural concept and a natural one.
So, for example, if you have a purported Love Goddess who makes people fall in love at will, but explain her in different ways, people either will or won’t accept her as a Love Goddess. (Whether or not anybody thinks she’s real.)
Suppose, for example, you explain that Venus is a human time traveller with some cool technology, who scans people’s brains, and rewires their synapses to encode beliefs and desires about their intended love one, in a way that constitutes being in love.
Nobody would consider that a Love Goddess. That is just not how a real Love Goddess does it.
In contrast, suppose you tell people there’s an irreducible essence of love, and Venus is a special kind of person whose essence is fundamentally related to that, and she can create Love directly, where Love is an irreducibly Love-y energy or substance, and envelop people in it, and that’s what being in Love is, and it just works that way.
Thats the sort of thing you’d recognize as a Love Goddess. You and I may think that’s impossible, and that the idea of an irreducible essence of Love is incoherent and empirically false, but we recognize the concept as a Love Goddess concept, which is distinct from the concept of a person who uses technology to manipulate reducible brain states—that’s a high-tech date-rape enabler, not a Love Goddess.
As for magnetism getting de-supernaturalized… I don’t know enough about the history of magnetism to use that example, but consider electricity.
For quite a while, many people thought that electricity was magical, and still thought it might be supernatural even after scientists were studying it. One reason was that it was just mysterious and creepy—it could move through solid matter invisibly, leap through the air dramatically, and kill you. It’s easy to read supernaturalism—weird essences—into the unknown, so it seemed magical or magic-like.
It also seemed to have something to do with life and volition—you could zap people with it and make them twitch involuntarily, and you could even zap dead frogs with it and make them twitch as though they were alive. That made it seem like a very good candidate for being basically or irreducibly connected to life and/or will. Maybe electricity was the supernatural life force people were still looking for—something that could just make things alive, or just will matter to move, or something.
Those intuitions fell apart when people found out how electricity actually behaves—it can move through solid matter, but only in a mindless way, like heat. It can jump through air, but only in a mindless way, like light. It doesn’t directly animate nonliving matter, it just sends signals down nerves that still function to muscles that still function, because they’re not really dead yet. And it follows mindless laws similar to water pressure, going from higher “pressure” (voltage) to lower. It doesn’t know you’re there and come after you. It’s stilll interesting in that it’s usually invisible and can kill you, but we’ve seen a lot of things that are invisible and can kill you—fast-moving musket balls, crushing mechanical force, excessive heat, lack of oxygen, poison gases, etc.
Electricity turned out to be just stuff—more similar to other everyday stuff than people didn’t think was supernatural than they’d thought, and specifically just as mindless. It doesn’t know anything, doesn’t care about anything, doesn’t want anything, and doesn’t have any basic, irreducible connection to anything you know or care about. It can’t tell you what’s true, or make somebody love you, or endow you with skill. It’s just a mindless entity that follows simple rules, which makes it potentially useful for tool-making, but that’s all. It ain’t magic. It’s only interesting as part of explanations of the usual sorts, or instrumentally. It’s not Interesting.
If that analysis is right, I think it supports what Boyer and Carrier are saying. When we naturalize things that were previously thought or suspected to be supernatural, the naturalization happens exactly when we eliminate irreducible essences of high-level, mental properties. (Or teleological ones, which are mind-like too.)
That very same thing happens whether we’re naturalizing Love or Electricity or The Ultimate Ground of Being—when the mind-like aspects get reduced away, and you realize you’re talking about something mindless and emotionless and goalless, it stops seeming a supernatural “Something More” and becomes Just More Stuff, which you can’t feel religious about any more.
All I can say is that I get a quite different story about the history of supernaturalism from friends who have studied the history of belief (theology and philosophy).
Ah. Now I understand more what you are saying, and I think we are closer that I thought.
No, I don’t believe that is true. There will still be attributes of those essences to study, and quantify. Scientifically hitting a wall seems to have happened in some areas, such as String Theory, but that has not promoted particle physics into some new magical category.
Paul W, I think that is part of the problem. For some (many?) the ground concept is an existential issue as you describe. But for others it is more of a moral reference point, god is the standard they judge everything else by. For still others it seems to be used precisely because it is so vague and subject to equivocation. These mysterians trot it out as a deepity to impress people who are not prone to trying to inderstand, preferring to revel in the awe and mystery.
That’s what irritates me about it so much. Whenever I have tried to unpack what someone means when they use it I end up chasing my own tail down the rabbit hole, emerging on the other side no closer to understanding than I started. When the existentialists see they are headed for the ‘god particle’ of the physicists they go all mushy and slide towards the moralist usage. When the moralists realize that other faith traditions have a different reference point (the floating ground you talk about in the final paragraph in #41) they go all mushy and slide towards the existentialists definition.
All the while the mysterians just smirk and tell me to embrace the wonder.
I’m guessing that somewhere out there is a sophisticated theologian who uses the word with precision and consistency. I have yet to find them.