In a post that was taken down I said that I found this to be brutally sincere and the most intellectually honest thing I'd ever read (although, thinking about it again, your casual remarks about metaphysical naturalism being polytheistic seem to be from left field; also I did read it before the staff edit and haven't re-read it afterward). When the mod message came up I clicked through the block filter to read what happened and I was so impressed by your honesty that I've taken you off that list.
But some questions remain.
I don't understand why you think the "casting pearls before swine" line works on any level. You readily admit that the bulk of the Bible - and certainly the parts to which I am referring - is "detestable," so why would it be a pearl in any analogy? Why do you refer to me, a person who, by your own admission, raises legitimate questions, as a swine? The only reasons I can possibly come up with are that the Bible is a pearl because it is true (even though you fully admit that this cannot be proven and must be understood via some miracle) and that I am a swine because you believe you've correctly identified my intentions, a conclusion that you presumably base on your own past self and the way you were. Essentially, you admit that I'm right - at least, as far as I can see from what's been presented to me - and then you ridicule me and say that no one should speak with me because I haven't had the bizarre personal experience that you had.
Do you not see a problem with this?
By my writing this at all, I am directly contradicting what I said to several people on private threads, and directly to the moderator who revised what I wrote. I told them that, because of her editing (I used the word "blotting out") of the direct words of Jesus (regarding swine and shaking dust off of feet), that I would no longer be posting on this board at all. I meant it, and if consistency were the most important thing to me, I would not be writing this. Instead, I am breaking my own previously taken firm stance to be done with the public threads of this board. So, those inclined to treat inconsistency as a moral failing and a complete repudiation of the one who is inconsistent may now accuse me of being a "flip-flopper".
Second, my comment to the moderator, and to others in private conversation, was that Jesus was attacked for what he said, and knew that the Apostles would be attacked after he was gone and they were still here teaching his message, and without his on-call supernatural miracle-making power. He told people in general to be kind to their enemies and to forgive, but he also told his Apostles that, when attacked for the faith they tried to preach, they should turn their backs and shake the dust off the soles of their sandals and walk away - and that God would damn the people who had treated them and their message so. Likewise, he warned all Christians not to cast their pearls (of wisdom, of knowledge of faith) before swine (aggressive unbelievers), for the swine would trample the pearls and attack the Christian message-bearers. This thread is on its 12th or 13th page now, and the way that you have torn into Christians for their sincere (if at times awkward and ill-advised) thoughts presented to you. You don't believe, you think the beliefs are foolish, and you've really gored some of them for their foolishness and weakness. They thought they were helping you, and thought you wanted the help. I was convinced that you were looking for just that experience: callow Christians making callow arguments, that you could slice and dice. And you do that well. So I used Christ's words, in more than one post, to try and warn Christians to STOP IT. Stop casting their pearls of faith before you, for you were just going to tear them apart. They didn't stop, and you did tear them apart.
In referring to you as "swine", I was using Jesus' words, and I was not ridiculing you. I was warning the Christians using Jesus' own words, to stop casting their pearls before you, because you were trampling them, and goring the Christians, and making a mockery out of them and their arguments. You are very intelligent and you know your Bible, better than most of them, so by stepping up to face you, they end up bloodied, and their faith looks as though it has been defeated by your logic, and it's not good. So I told them, using Jesus' words, to STOP IT. To let it, and you, be. I said that you were not going to be convinced by anything they said, which is true. And I specifically used Jesus' words of wisdom for dealing with such a situation.
The mod did not like that. Of course you didn't either, but that was not the point. I was not ridiculing YOU - I was using an insulting term for you, one that Jesus used to describe men doing to Christians what you were doing - and taking Christ's own admonishment to the Christians: DO NOT DO THIS. STOP!
They didn't stop, and the mod deleted all four of my quotes of Jesus on the matters of swine and dusty sandals. She deleted the whole post that told Christians at length to stop engaging with you only to get eviscerated on you. I did not like it at all that the mod deleted those words, so I rounded on her, told her that she had "blotted out the words of Christ, four times", to spare the feelings of an aggressive atheist. And I told her she need not concern herself with editing me again, because I would no longer be posting here.
But here I am, not only reversing my earlier statement of departure, but getting ready to flash some pearls, to do what I told other Christians to stop doing.
Why?
Because of what you wrote to me. It was direct and honest, as all conversation must be to be of any use to anybody. FDR and Stalin managed to remain on speaking terms and thereby save the whole world, and neither you nor I is Stalin, so certainly we CAN communicate. Your message made me want to. That is all there is to say about that.
Now, as to the points you raise in your message, going forward from the beginning, I never said "polytheistic". I said "pantheistic". Pantheism, as I use the term, is the belief that the natural law which drives all things that can be seen and measured scientifically is God. It is a matter of definitions.
In the abstract, I don't know what "God" is. It's a word. It's the Old Norse word for "good". I have had Christians who look at God very differently rail on me quite harshly for my austere, mathematical approach to God, but I don't particularly care. Each man can worry about God in his own way. For me, the question was defining "God" sufficiently that, if I could find something that met that description, I would have found God.
By my lights, God is that which is omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal and omniscient. Whatever unites those four attributes is God by definition. Anything lacking a single element is not God, again by definition. Peering out at my world through educated, young and eager eyes, I looked to see if there was anything that met those four definitions.
And here is what I saw.
There is something that meets the definition of "omnipresent" - the universe itself.
Is there something that meets the definition of "omnipotent"? Well, what would that mean, exactly? It would mean something capable of simultaneously controlling every speck of matter and every pulse of energy, and perhaps even space itself, everywhere in the universe. Does such a thing exist? Yes, clearly. The laws of physics. The laws of nature - Natural Law.
We're already halfway to God, without breaking a sweat!
Is there something that meets the definition of "eternal", if that word is understood to mean "for all time" (with "time" being a measuring stick for the sequence of things). That depends. The universe certainly has existed since the Big Bang, but one then, inevitably, must ask "but what about before the Big Bang". Now, I've heard efforts to reduce the concept of time to something that is "meaningless" when there are no objects, to assert that "time didn't exist before the Big Bang", obviating the problem of "before". The problem with that explanation is the same one that an atheist has with an eternal God - and who created God? With God, the argument is that "He always was and he always will be". That's fine, as far as it goes, but it's a bald assertion. When speaking of the Universe, however, that apparently began in a Big Bang, one cannot say "It always was an it always will be". It had a beginning. And if one waves one's arms around and suggests that the question of "time" or "before" the Big Bang is "illegitimate", because of some definitional sleight of hand, one sounds exactly like some Christian or preacher trying earnestly to change the meanings of words to avoid a problem. You object to these efforts, that basically say "bad is good, if God does it!" It might actually be TRUE, but it's no help to YOU to say such a thing, because it sounds like special pleading, which is to say, poppycock - desperate and pathetic.
Well, with me it is the same thing when it comes to time. I consider time to be a yardstick of sequence. If the Big Bang occurred, there was a "before the Big Bang", and even though watches did not exist before the universe, it is possible to conceive of a watch sitting out there in the nothingness, ticking away, waiting for the Big Bang to happen. And then a Big Bang coming out of nowhere and literally creating everything in an instant seems deus ex machina (really, it's just a sophisticated way of saying "Let there be light!") begs the question of why? And what made it happen? And Why didn't it happen before that?
String theorists have branes and multiple dimensions by which they try to solve logic problems mathematically, but that all sounds and feels very much like hard math, hard math, hard math - black box that converts hard math into identifiable physics - Big Bang! Voila! It is as utterly unsatisfying as any theistic creation, to my mind. And it has nothing whatever to back it up.
But there is another possibility that really does provide an eternity of sorts. I did not see this first through science, but through a discussion of Hindu religion. The Hindus do not have a "linear" Creation - to - Apocalypse universe. Rather, they have cycles of cycles of cycles, with the universe creating and destroying itself in endless cycles, with no beginning and no end.
Now, this is interesting, because it provides for an eternal universe, without beginning and without ending. The question, then, is whether or not the Hindus intuited an actual feature of the universe. Back in the 1970s, with Big Bang theory flourishing and the fact of "red shift" being taught in all of the popular science magazines and programs, the concept of gravity as the brake that would eventually stop expansion was an expected discovery. I recall Carl Sagan, on his series Cosmos, discussing the concept of the expanding universe from the Big Bang slowing and eventually imploding in a Big Crunch, setting up the conditions for the next Big Bang. Und so weiter. Ilico presto, I have a diesel engine universe, a cycle of cycles, very Hindu-like, and I have eternity.
Of course, therefore, I believed that we would discover sufficient gravity to close the system.
And now I have three of the four features of God, demonstrable or nearly so: omnipotence, omnipresence (indeed, universality) and, with the diesel engine universe, I have eternality.
What about omniscience? Ah, well, that's a problem. Still, look how very far down the road of proving God scientifically I had come? YOU may not like the proof, but my purpose wasn't to satisfy you, or anybody else. It was to satisfy my own curiosity about the concept of God, to not cede the field of "God" to the theists.
And just through science, as I understood it, I had come 3/4ths of the way to God. In fact, I had already discovered Jefferson's God. For here, I had a God that was not theist, but was deist.
I even had an ancient sacred text, of sorts, Lucretius Varus' "De Rerum Natura", c. 76 BC, with his atoms and his evolution of each thing in its time. I had demonstrability. I had logic. It was a beautiful thing, and my true religion. Lucretius wrote:
"For true piety is not sprinking blood on altars, but in contemplating the universe with a tranquil mind."
There is a word for this belief system, that Nature or Natural Law is God. The word is pantheism. You mistakenly thought I said "polytheism" (many-gods), but I did not. What I said was pantheism (all-god, universal god). That was my religion. I was a convinced deistic pantheism, three quarters of the full concept of "god" had been proven to my satisfaction.
But that last piece, the omniscience, is what transforms deism (of which I was certain) to theism. The other things were provable, but omniscience was not, at least not now. "Sci-ence" - meaning "knowledge" (the root word of "omniscience", not the word "science" referring to the academic discipline) obviously exists. We're talking about the universe, but part of it. At least in one small place in one small way, the universe contemplates itself. In the beginning, this was not so, but the inevitable functioning of immutable physical laws gave rise to stars, stars to basic elements (as stardust), elements to molecules, molecules to greater and greater complexity. In the methane soup of the early earth, and probably a billion other planets, electricity from lighting caused amino acids, and over oceans of time, self-reproducing chemicals arranged, ultimately giving rise to first life. Life became more and more sophisticated, until the first cells became able to react to their environment and make primitive choices. Nerves evolved, and brains, and minds - and the universe perceived itself.
Now we men, who started as naked hairy beasts, have evolved and learned to the point where we can manipulate all of the known chemical elements, create new ones, and have control over a certain portion of our environment, by harnessing the natural laws. We are not separate from the universe, but a part of it. Intelligence, sci-ence clearly exists. Omniscience does not appear to exist...YET. But considering how far we had come, from inert matter to highly intelligent life, through the steady and irresistible forces of natural law - the law programmed into every speck of matter and energy at the Big Bang, it was easy enough for me to apply simple teleological reasoning to see intelligence continue to evolve and expand its hold over material nature. Give that a few hundred billion more years, as the universe expanded, slowed, and then began to contract, and I could see how intelligence, science, control of information, would eventually expand until matter and energy were under its control, everywhere. And that is omniscience. With omniscience attained as the shrinking universe reconcentrated to a point, the now omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal God - the "once and future God" - imprinted its law upon every speck of matter and energy...and a Big Bang happens again, starting the cycle anew - the Diesel Engine universe, whose God is deistic natural law evolving, through the evolution of matter, to a true theos - whose creation, then, is the next universe. The Hindus intuited right with their cycle of cycles.
Than it is Scientific Pantheism, and with the science and material world of 1985, it was a perfect religion - provable and true. It was my faith, and I was firm in it.
Unlike most scientifically minded people, I was friendly to religion. After all, the religious mystics of all were the intelligences who first intuited God, though they did not understand who, and what, God really is.
Among the major religions, I appreciated the Hindus for getting the cycle of cycles of the universe right, but considered that the badly erred when they applied the same notion to human souls. Reincarnation had no basis in anything but wishful thinking, and the visible results in the society, with its massive ignorance and poverty and sense that all of that was somehow cosmic justice...well, that didn't work.
I admired the simplicity of Islamic logic, but found that the actual practice of the religion was so completely contaminated with medieval Arab culture that the cultural aspects simply choked off the religious logic.
Christianity as a logical religion, with its man-god, was the most fanciful, reflecting its Greco-Roman roots with their wild pantheon of demigods, but the Catholic brand of Christianity was practical and very humanistic, and logical in its sphere. That the Catholic Church embraced the theory of evolution - a fundamental truth of the universe - was very important to me. It meant that the Catholics were the most rational of the Christians - they got that major part right. The huge Catholic charitable infrastructure worldwide was also proof of the human goodness of Catholicism. It might be illogical and ultimately untrue as to particularities, but it got the big picture right as far as the evolution of the universe, and the cultural thrust towards service and poverty relief was (and is) without equal in the world of men. By contrast, I found Protestantism to be obscurantist and foolish, the worship of a book of Bronze Age myths to the exclusion of everything else, including scientific reason. And of course the 1980s were the era of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart and all sorts of moralistic nonsense.
That's the way I perceived it. And that is the context in which the rest follows. My natural, native religion is scientific evolutionary pantheism. Unlike scientists who are hostile to religion, because they believe themselves intellectually superior, I always recognized that religion is just old science, the intuitive insights of the brightest men of their age into the ways of the universe. They came up with many truths, especially about human nature. But they did not have the scientific method to test their intuitions. And of all of them the only ones who seemed to have been able to evolve in their thinking and accept the truth of evolution was Catholicism, which is why it was the largest (it made the most sense to people) and the kindest (all that charity, medicine and education being dispensed out there). And why it was such a difficult threat for the closed-minded Soviets to deal with in Poland.
So, that pantheism you mistook for polytheism was anything but. It was a provable religion, and one I held with certitude in 1985.
But the cracks began to appear in it. The perfection began to be marred by inconvenient scientific facts, and by nature bending events that broke the symmetry.
My path has been very different from yours. You started out a Protestant, what I would have considered in 1985 to be a stubborn Luddite, the worshiper of a book full of Bronze Age myths. We probably would have had a great deal of trouble getting along back then, because I would keep on attacking the stories in your book, asking you how you could possibly believe that, and then doing things like "Want to see God?" and then dropping my keys, picking them up and dropping them again. And this was, to my mindset, really the ultimate proof of my God. He was so dependable that even the nutty religionists didn't "take it on faith" that the keys would fall. They KNEW that the keys would fall. Of course they would then say that this didn't demonstrate God, and I would reply with "There is none so blind as he who refuses to see."
I was sad to see my old religion fall apart. It was such a beautiful thing, spinning in all its shining logical reasonableness.
The facts that destroyed its symmetry and made the top tumble include miracles, but are not confined to them.
And maybe, if you wish that I should go on, I will tell you about them tomorrow.
I think that you will not find me very interested in engaging in some sort of Biblical discussion when speaking about God. My first religion was scientific, and that became replaced by a form of Catholicism. Yes, I have read the Bible, quite exhaustively, in fact, seeking out Hebrew and Greek meanings and even the pictographs. But the Bible is very quaternary to what I believe. It's an interesting source book, a place to find examples and quotes and wisdom, but it is not central for me, and never has been.
Your Christianity was Protestant, which is ENTIRELY based on the Bible, so when the Bible failed for you, your religion evaporated. Of course, therefore, you channel your religious objections to Christianity through the Bible. For my Christianity, the Bible is tertiary or quaternary source. This is different. So, for example, taking some quote of St. Paul and trying to hold it over my head as law? First, St. Paul is not God. Second, St. Paul does not make law. Third, St. Paul was all over the place in his writings. He was writing letters to specific people, not divine law. St. Paul has lots of opinions. I like him, generally, but I don't agree with him on many things. As a Protestant, you would have said that I must accept it all as God's authority. But I'm not a Protestant and that's nonsense. What happens in a physics lab is God's visible authority. What happens in an epistle of St. Paul is the opinion of St. Paul, not God.
Of course this means that we can actually talk to each other, because you've learned that book (in English), and you know the contradictions and the seams in it. If I am going to talk about God, I am going to speak in terms of realities, and that means physics, chemistry, miracles, human endeavors. When it comes to the Biblical record of that, I'm always going to be sticking with what YHWH said in the OT - in the Hebrew properly translated - and what Jesus said in the NT. And the rest of it I'm going to pretty much ignore, because it isn't authoritative in my eyes.
