Seen on a restroom wall: “God is dead: Nietzsche.
Nietzsche is dead: God.”
* * * * * * * hey, who ya gonna believe, huh?

Descartes walks into a café and sits down ready to order.
A waiter comes up to him and asks, “Do you need a menu?”
Descartes replies, “I think not,” and he disappears!
* * * * * * *Poof! That’ll teach him to be a dualist.

Overheard in 18th century England: “Did you hear that George
Berkeley died? His girlfriend stopped seeing him.”
* * * * * * *Taking “seeing is believing” too literally?

What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vender?
“Make me one with everything.”
What did the hot dog vender say when the Buddhist asked for his change?
“Change come from within.”
* * * * * * *Yeah, try to find it!

Did you hear about the Buddhist who spilled his coffee while driving to work?
He had bad kar-mug.
* * * * * * *HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

What a ripper of an article! As I recall, Eagleton was a Marxist literary and cultural critic, and no doubt under the new syllabus his works will be banned and burned in the main street.

There are, I suspect, three things about religion that no one can really deny.

The first is that even for us unbelievers the Judeo-Christian value set provided a guide to life and to relationships (social, personal, business) that was good in the sense that it emphasized care, humility, honesty, and respect for others. As that value set evaporates, we have little to replace it with.

Second, in a time when some of us wonder about a Grand Unified Theory, about a time before time, about what preceded the big bang and why, there is a whole lot of mystery out there, and it is hard not to have a feeling akin to religiosity about it.

Third, one of the worst developments of the c20 was the removal of mystery from religion. Priests riding motor scooters and playing guitars, the abolition of Latin, the idea that religion was just really a form of smiling, unctuous, rubbery social work, and that religion had to be relevant (why? why on earth should a god’s ideas be “relevant” to us? Are my ideas relevant to the frittata I made yesterday?) all of these have gutted and filleted religion, and have thrown out with the bathwater the essence of standing before a mystery - which is a sense of humility.

btw: I am not to be understood as arguing for, or accepting, Christianity.

But this soft-nosed argument is ripped to shreds later on by a James Farrell in this comment:

I can’t agree with you on this one, Nicholas. Dawkins is a brilliant expositor of science, and his criticisms of religion are spot on. So what if he isn’t an expert on theology? Here’s a challenge: if you read a scathing and hilarious critique of astrology written by an author who wasn’t himself steeped in astrological wisdom, would you really be cross and indignant about all the simplifications and strawman demolitions in the book?

The only people who are going to get upset about this book are ones who have an emotional loyalty to religion and can’t stand seeing it rubbished. This obviously applies to Eagleton, and I can’t for the life me understand why you say ‘it’s not done on behalf of religion’. A bit of googling on Eagleton tells me he is or was religious.

Nor do I agree, being as objective as I can (as an admirer of Dawkins) that it’s a particularly clever or persuasive review - far less with Richard Phillipps conclusion that it’s a ‘ripper’. It’s bad tempered and unreasonable, and quite incoherent in key places where it’s pretending to clinch the argument. What on earth does this mean, for example:

He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.

And this doesn’t seem to make any sense at all:

Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain.

Is he really saying that Dawkins’ faith that, say, his wife is not really is biological sister, is on a par with religious faith simply because neither is ‘unimpeachable?’

And where does Eagleton stand, anyway? Does he think that belief in the God of Moses is any more reasonable than in Baal or Zeus? If so, on what grounds? If not, would he take exception to an uninformed attack on any of these beliefs?

And this comment is followed up by a comment from a Gaby:

Emphatically what James said. Beat me to the punch.

First, I haven’t read Dawkins’s book. But Eagleton’s review wouldn’t dissuade me from doing so.

I thought generally a poor review as a book review. One example from his own “molehill” is that he doesn’t tell us what Dawkins’s intentions are. Perhaps it is a piece of agitprop aimed at refuting and ridiculing the more common, in both senses of the word, religious falsities prevalent. The “pinhead” differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus may not just be relevant to this task.

Further Eagleton’s positive views don’t really illuminate. Why is belief in God not like belief in the tooth fairy? Asserting God’s “transcendence” doesn’t help nor saying that it is a “condition of possibility” and that it sustains all things “by love”. More or less these are things attributed to the old guy in the sky with the white beard, so I’m happy to lose that image.

El Tel, however, does give a good description of my favored view of Jesus as basically an “A.D.” hippie preachin’ peace’n’love Baby. Was he a vegun as well? Probably not given the “loaves and fishes” supposed prestidigitation.

But still a little later in the discussion a soft-nosed comment by an Ingolf appears:

Gaby, I think Nicholas was alluding to the meaninglessness of being dogmatic when dealing with “ultimate” questions. It’s all very well to flay the more literal religious or spiritual responses that merely paste a poster called “God” over the void, but in doing so one is no nearer to answering the questions for which these various belief systems have through the ages sought to be an answer. The simple truth, at least as I see it, is that not only do we not know the right answers, we don’t even know the right questions and are unlikely to ever do so. As Nicholas says, the very least this realization ought to engender is some sense of humility.

On my reading, the more sophisticated forms of all the major spiritual traditions have throughout the ages been only too aware of the absurdities and dangers lurking in any and all attempts to define God. Indeed, many of them prefer to avoid doing so altogether. The awe we properly feel before the sheer immensity of our ignorance can at times combine with a sense of transcendence, a pull towards the divine that lies at the core of all spirituality. (Both these concepts are of course equally difficult to define but not perhaps always so hard to feel).

Any determined atheist is in my experience at least as much in the grip of a belief system as the most fervent believer. For the scientist who feels no sense of the divine — which is obviously just fine — agnosticism seems to me the only honest stance. It is Dawkins’ fanaticism that many, including me, find so disagreeable, that and the way he arrogates to himself the cloak of reason, not aware, it would seem, of the inherent absurdity of his own position.

Well, needless to say this soft-nosed comment is taken to task later on by the hard-nosed group. If you’ve waded through this far, why not just read the whole thing? There are 52 comments in all and the whole discussion took place and ended in 2006.

Certain products of modern physics that I did not find mentioned at all by these posters are the baffling, one might say a-rational, findings of quantum theory; i.e. the duality of particles and waves, the inability to define a quantum state until it is measured, the phenomena of non-locality, and other such paradoxes. Considering these things, one wonders how we can know anything at all. Yes, the mathematics works, but not the underlying reality. Makes one question what reality is after all. And we haven’t even gotten to questions such as what came before the big bang, and how come we have an Anthropic principle which states that even the slightest deviation in physical constants from their present values would make life as we know it on earth impossible. OK, enough for now. I’m stumped.

I feel I have still not quite captured the essence of the distinction Carse makes. I think I’ll post this for now and come back later. He has a great analysis of one of my favorite poems, Emily Dickinson’s I Heard a Fly Buzz When I died so I want to bring that in too. There’s never enough time to post and read!

In this NYRB article Dyson reviews two books on global warming and provides his own prologue to the piece. In this prologue he shows that there is a rapid (twelve years) exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and vegetation which is very important for the long range future of global warming. Neither of the two books he reviews mentions it, he says. But he devotes considerable space to the book by Nordhaus who concludes that a “low-cost backstop” might provide the best climate policy. However, Nordhaus is reluctant to discuss this in any detail, partly because, as an economist and not a scientist, he does not wish to question the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which considers the science of climate change to be settled.

Dyson shows that the “low-cost backstop” option of Nordhaus has considerable potential in view of the evidence for rapid exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and plants. He considers it likely that genetically engineered carbon-eating trees could be developed within twenty years. These carbon-eating trees would convert the carbon from the atmosphere into root systems which are then buried underground so that the carbon is not returned to the atmosphere. Here is a great potential solution to the problem of reducing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

He spends less time on the book by Zedillo which covers a wider range of topics than the Nordhaus book. This book provides the minority opinions of Richard Lindzner of MIT who answers the question of whether the alarm of global warming is founded on fact with a resounding no. The majority opinions, most dogmatically presented by Howard Dalton of Great Britain, state that urgent action is needed now across the world to avert a major threat to the environment and human society. Dyson clearly questions this view.

After reading the NYRB article, I found an even more fascinating article by Dyson on the subject of climate change in which he goes deeper into his views on the subject. It reads very well and I strongly recommend it to any interested parties.

Finally, I was fortunate this morning to find a wonderful interview with Freeman Dyson by Robert Wright. It’s interesting what he says about religion. To him, religion is a way of life and not a matter of belief. He claims he is a Christian without the theology. What is left of Christianity when you take the theology away?, he is asked. Well almost the whole thing, he says, it’s a community of people in a church who are taking care of each other, and also there’s a great deal of beautiful language and there’s a great deal of music; it’s an art form much more than a philosophy. (Sounds a lot like humanistic UUism!) But he does believe there is some instinct of a mind at work in the universe. Not only that, but quantum physics shows that matter at the micro level is clearly not anything we can have experience of. The mathematical theory works just fine, but the reality of it is quite literally out of our world. He has much to say about the macro level as well. His bottom line is that the universe is filled with enormous mysteries of which we know very little indeed. One such mystery is the almost daily bursts of extremely intense gamma rays from completely unknown origins. But there are countless others. The universe is unimaginably amazing and mysterious.

It’s all in your head, you see. Or is it? Nice singing, Brain!

This is a really amusing and charming video. Well worth watching.

My objective is to straddle science, philosophy and religion and see what kind of a mixture I might end up with, if any.

Second, where I’m at: I’m at the last chapter of Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life by Paul Davies. At last I found a science book that really takes seriously Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? and it even reads like a detective thriller.

As Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka says,
In our times such disparate thinkers as Wittgenstein and Heidegger have been struck by its poignancy. As Wittgenstein puts it: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.” He is believed to have experienced at times “a certain feeling of amazement that anything should exist at all,” and Heidegger has developed his metaphysics as the “exfoliation” of the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

I’m with you, Ludwig. That the world is is the mystical. I often have that exact same feeling: a certain feeling of amazement that anything should exist at all.

Here’s what Homer Simpson thinks about the question:

Well, maybe just edged away, not really flown? Back in 2004, in an interview with the Christian philosopher Gary Habermas, he claimed then to have changed to deist from atheist, but a deist in the sense that God is the first cause, not a being who acts in the world. He rejected revealed religion, the afterlife, God as a source of good, and the resurrection of Jesus as an historical fact. Pretty weak kneed Christianity?

Later he seems to have moved a further notch back toward atheism by rejecting the fine tuning arguments which earlier he said were the basis for his “flight” from atheism. Still, in late 2006 he joined 11 other academics in urging the British government to teach intelligent design in the public schools.

Very recently, Flew has come out with a new book, There Is A God with Roy Abraham Varghese listed as co-author. However, this book has become controversial through an article in the New York Times which claims that Varghese wrote most of the book and that Flew had flown off into mental decline. This article is quoted at length here, where the view that Flew has simply flown off the deep end is emphasized, and Varghese has responded. The debate flows on.

I stumbled across further discussion of the “Has Flew Flown?” controversy here. This is a very interesting discussion or debate on the nature of reality, flying off from Flew, by some pretty interesting people, although there’s also some acrimony and name-calling there. Typically, anything goes in the blogisphere….. On reading more, I see there’s a very interesting conversation going on there between John Loftus and Bill Gnade, which I’m now trying to follow.

UPDATE: The amazing conversation between John Loftus (Atheist) and Bill Gnade (Christian) can be followed here.

The book starts simply enough: two friends, Anthony and Quentin, are waiting for a bus on a dusty road and decide instead to walk when the bus doesn’t come. They then discover people trying to locate the escaped lion which is nowhere in sight. But they walk on with no problem. Things rapidly get more complicated, however, and I won’t go into that, only to say it gets mysteriouser and mysteriouser. A coldly intellectual woman, named Damaris, who Anthony is in love with, becomes involved in the story, and a butterfly addict loses it when he, with Anthony, sees a gigantic and beautiful butterfly (obviously an archetype). An enormous snake which can move the earth appears, as well as the most massive lion you’ve ever seen! Rumblings in the distance, ignored by many as thunder, are really roars of the gigantic lion. An enormous and beautiful eagle helps Anthony, and in the end he wins the love of Damaris. Many more complexities weave in and out of the story: Quentin loses it completely and is saved by Damaris, and a woman is unsuccessfully turned into a snake. Great fodder for a fantasy movie.

There are also some pretty deep relgious-philosophical discussions in the book which I found I had to struggle with. There is a reconciliation in the end, primarily caused by Anthony who learns the right balance of the archetypes. All in all, it’s an exciting and completely unusual book which I think could be made into a great movie.

Update:Let me thank Steve Hayes for recommending this book, and for introducing me to Charles Williams, a person associated with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as a member of the Inklings.

It turns out that Liminocentricity is quite an interesting word. The link is to a paper entitled, The Structure of Consciousness - Liminocentricity, Enantiodromia, and Personality by John Fudjack, in itself an interesting name. This is a fairly long paper which provides a visual metaphor for ‘liminocentric’ organization, applies it to human consciousness, and goes on to explain why this is appropriate and why it has a baring on Jung’s theory of psychological types. So, what is ‘liminocentric’ organization, and why should we care?

Fudjack starts by providing three diagrams, the third of which is liminocentric. For his first diagram, he shows the letter T, where the letter consists of Xs (second level) in a T-formation, with each X itself made up of a series of Os (third level). This arrangement is not fractal, has only three levels, and is not liminocentric. Then the second diagram shows little Ts making up the big T. Each little T itself is made up of littler Ts in the same fashion although these aren’t shown on the diagram because this is too impractical. This is a fractal arrangement because the Ts can in principle go on forever. Finally, the third diagram shows Xs which are made up of small Ts with the Xs making up the big T. This is not ‘fully’ fractal because the large T is made up not of smaller Ts, but of Xs, and these Xs are not made up of smaller Xs, but of Ts. Confusing? Better look at the diagrams. In any case, the larger T is actually ULTIMATELY made up of small Ts. There could be any number of stages, for example, the Xs could be made up of Os and the Os made up of something else, and so on, between large T and the small Ts. This is what’s known as liminocentricity.

A ‘liminocentric’ structure, then, has the property of being ‘indistinguishable’ at its highest and lowest levels of organization. Fudjack claims, after conversations with the physicist Brian Greene, that the ’string theory’ in physics says that “extremely large distances in the physical world may be LITERALLY identical to (i.e. indistinguishable from) extremely small distances”, and thus that physical reality may be liminocentrically ordered.

The paper goes on to give several other examples of liminocentricity:

In earlier articles we have also shown how liminocentricity is [1] utilized as an explanatory device in music theory; [2] used in Indian myth to help us ‘pull ourselves up by our bootstraps’, according to Mary Doniger O’Flaherty; [3] appears as a metaphor for ‘God’ in the work of Plotinus; and [4] operates as a principle of organization in the mandala in general, and in the figures of the Enneagram and Dzogchen mandalas in particular.

In Part 2 of the paper Fudjack describes the structure of human consciousness and shows how it is liminocentrically ordered. But this is too much to go into here. This post is long enough!

Perhaps the beginning lines of the last paragraph of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets sum it up:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Oh yes, I read the reviews of Avery’s book and they’re all quite glowing except for one which calls it incoherent.