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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Is that like Taliesin the 6th century Welsh poet?
Yes. My poetry is something of an abomination - so I bastardised it a bit before using the name.
Which is just butchery of the language in order to confuse the argument. A god has to be sentient to be a god, even if you are talking about gods, there is the requirement of sentience.
Particularly if you are talking about God, as in the Judao-Christian figure. God, is a character in a book with a personality.
If you are going to refer to everything, well that is the universe. There are perfectly good words for everything, all, and the whole, there is no need to try and tie the concept to God.
Reductionism can carry us (as a technology-using species) from sub-atomic particles to black holes, but I agree with Kaufman that it can't explain everything--at least at our current level of knowledge. Many of you seem to think that it's not a scientist's place to be discussing anything outside the concrete, but science is, after all, a way to understand the workings of the universe...and some of those workings, at least on the quantum level, are pretty fuzzy. The interlocking functions of living creatures that make up the biosphere certainly inspire awe and wonder...and we all struggle to make sense of our own place in the grand structure, or abandon that struggle to an acceptance of meaningless, transitory existence. Many people--most people, in this country--just can't handle the sterility of that idea.
I think Kaufman is on the track of a sort of materialistic spirituality, that doesn't require the supernatural, but still gives people a sense that they are one with--something. He's far from alone, as the increasing number of adherents to nature-based religion indicate. Personally, I see a lot of benefits to encouraging people to engage emotionally with the biosphere, as they will then be more likely to accept that we have to set limits on ourselves as a species if we are not going to alter it to the point that we compromise our own survival. I think the point that since so many people like to believe in god, that it may be easier to get them to accept another definition than to abandon their superstition entirely, also has some validity.
In the scientific professions you have many researchers trying different approaches to similar problems. The problem of humanity's relationship with the biosphere also requires a diversity of solutions. This one at least has the advantage of being based in empiricism.
The central, tugging, ineffable and ineluctable point of generation itself is, if not an empirical truth (how could it be, when it must be beyond capture and apprehension, and therefore comprehension), a truth of consciousness. If we are never going to know, through sense data, the truth of falsity of any proposition relating to genesis (in the customary sense of the word), then I go back to Gerard Manly Hopkins: (From the Poetry Foundation http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173664, but copyright free these days)
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Seeing as the religious impulse seems to be part of our primal nature( the impulse to make meaning and connect with what is larger than our lone existence), I think there is room for talking about the evolution of the concept and experience of "God". That is why it can be so meaningful for us to engage in religious ritual at times of life passages that may not "logically" make sense. We are taking what has been given to us from our past as human beings and remaking and experiencing it in a new way. We are evolving past a traditional religious experience into a worldview of connection, and seeing this as sacred may contribute towards our survival as creatures on this planet.
'Isn't nature splendid?'
Yes, no argument here.
'So let's call that splendor "god"!'
Um ... OK. I won't, but whatever floats your boat.
'Dawkins wrote a whole book called Unweaving the Rainbow about
how splendid nature was, but didn't call it "God". That's
because he's a fundamentalist.'
Er ...
The thing about reductionism isn't that it thinks everything
is small and essentially pointless ... it's that it thinks that all the big and splendid things came about by a series
of quite simple physical stages. The universe of science is
literally billions of times bigger and more complicated and
richer than the bronze age religious view of the universe,
but it seems to be governed by only a handful of physical rules, replaying and combining.
If there are people who can't find meaning or morality
without imagining a god imposing those things on them ...
well, that's a serious limitation on their part. 'God did it all' as the answer to every question is the biggest act of reductionism of the lot.
Seriously. Is it Joan Walsh? Someone else?
This is another in the (apparently) endless series of articles/interviews known as: let's find a smart person to say dumb things about god and/or religion.
So who keeps authorizing this crap?
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.
7. God’s Grandeur
THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; 5
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; 10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
from Bartleby.com
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