Transcendent Indwelling

To continue my rambling series on personificationism, the way we typically discuss "God" makes no sense at all.  (Out of simple curiosity, I have chosen to ignore the obtrusive irony of committing these thoughts to words.)  For a long time, I have been averse to both Evangelical Christians like all the usual culprits and New Atheists like all the usual culprits.  It seems there is a dearth of surly, self-appointed team captains willing to speak for the radical withholding of judgment.

Perhaps at least part of my aversion to both factions is rooted in their tendency to debate the nature of a representation, which just doesn't make any sense at all.  Mr. Hand says "Romanticism is green".  Mr. Book says it is not green.  I have more antipathy towards the New Atheists because as scientists they are presumably not proceeding from first principles; this - and a history of science full of arrogant fuck-ups - compels more cooperative metacognition.  But then again, conceptualization has never been the scientist's strong suit.

A typical argument used by the New Atheists comes from Betrand Russell's teapot.  The positivist Russell parodied the claims of the religious by postulating that a teapot exists in orbit around the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.  One cannot disprove the existence of that teapot, therefore Russell's claim that the teapot exists is just as invalid a claim as "God exists".  At first glance, this seems like a fair attack on the existence of God; yet upon closer examination, we realize that Russell's claim involves the physical object of a "teapot", whereas "God" is a received linguistic artifact.  Russell and the New Atheists commit an egregious category error in compelling a falsifiable conception of the divine.

There are some who claim to feel the presence of the divine.  I am generally not one of these people (unless I'm hiking).  I will admit that living deliberately under this logical umbrella may someday compel a religious conversion, but for now, I find a logical approach to the world useful.  The romantic in me sees that my culture has taught me to suppress and ignore my emotions.  The empiricist in me judges that doing so has had pretty good results so far.  The romantic responds that the data on which the interpretation of results is based come from within my culture.  The empiricist counters with the claim that that is all there is and ever can be.  And this back and forth continues while I relentlessly continue to chase "knowledge".

Like anyone else, I have the occasional intuitive epiphany.  And like anyone else, I cannot explain where such ideas come from, since the idea that we can discuss subjective intuitive phenomena in universal logical terms just doesn't make any sense to me at all.  My decision to become a doctor was one such inexplicable epiphany, and I am dreading the inevitable interview question.

I reject the idea that these intuitive crystallizations are caused by any mass-marketed supernatural corporeality, and I am a strong skeptic of universal claims about the divine, in particular teleological claims.  For example, an earthquake literally just happened as I write this.  A thousand years ago, I may have thought that that earthquake represented a force more powerful than myself.  I may have read into it contextually that I shouldn't continue this potentially blasphemous post (since really, anything that doesn't adhere to the dominant paradigms preferred by power is blasphemy, no matter how harmless or well-meaning).  But, it is because of a web of scientific progress and cultural dissemination since that time that I now "know" that the earthquake I just experienced is the simple result of plate tectonics.  Any interested party can go and evaluate that.      

Because some things (like earthquakes) have been better explained by science in that particular historical interval, there is a tendency to eliminate the entire suite of ancient knowledge in favor of scientific explanations for everything, no matter how loosely defined or poorly conceptualized or spurious they may be and even when doing so represents an obvious category error.  Look at evolutionary psychology, for instance, a science which purports to explain all of human behavior as rooted in physical, evolutionary changes (as opposed to natural forces or emergent forces or the complex system we call "culture", etc.)  The idea that we scrap everything that does not easily lend itself to scientifically presupposed objectivity is central to the New Atheist platform.  It is reductionist beyond the most pejorative sense of the word.  Accordingly, we often see evolutionary psychology directly contradict itself.

From my perspective, the way I see religion and language, the debate between theists and atheists makes no sense.  Representations of deities have always been on the far right of a scale from abstract to concrete.  The divine presence that A-san feels may render itself to the word "God" by convention, but it will probably not match the divine presence that B-san feels.

It seems like the ancients grasped this, although the inherent difficulties of articulating what is necessarily an abstraction have been further mutated and permutated by the tides of history.  That is to say, representations of God in sacred texts probably emerged in conjunction with the metaphors and motifs prevailing at that time.  As soon as they were written down for posterity, they lost their power.  

Given this, it makes sense that (1) YHWH's "name" is "I am" (although the "I" in the English translation grounds YHWH in an imagined real subject); (2) Islam wisely forbids depictions of God; (3) Spinoza's God (Einstein's God) avoids the problems inherent in representation by being all that exists or beyond all that exists and subject to an inherently partial and subjective understanding; and (4) Eastern religions are also generally pantheistic or panentheistic.  

The existence of any of these contextually-faithful non-representations is necessarily non-debatable by science's own terms, since nothing has been hypothesized or objectified.  Various concepts of the divine remain abstract and free from the human burden of language let alone empirical observation.  It has been pointed out by many that it is when religion attempts to interface to the human world by representing the divine concretely that it gets into trouble.  Ascribing God with objective, human attributes (like omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience) is a slippery slope down a road to eventual falsifiable claim.  This crude representation is what we are seeing debated in the American public sphere in the twenty-first century.