A song that could be silent. An ocean that could be dry. How about a book that could be nothing but deepities? That last one exists: it’s called A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet
Here’s the key.
And then one day it hit me: I didn’t have to work from some pre-packaged idea of “God” and ask if that could exist. The question “Does God exist?” is a hopeless distraction that will never lead anywhere positive. I had to turn the fundamental question on its head. If I wanted to find a God that is real, I had to start from what’s real, what actually exists. I realized that the question that matters is this: Could anything actually exist in the universe, as science understands it, that is worthy of being called God?
In other words, she recognizes that there is no good reason and no respectable evidence for believing in any of the existing religions, but she really, really wants to keep believing, so she’s going to go looking for a hook to hang the label “God” on. I could have spared her the effort of writing a whole book on this nonsense: get a sharpie and a piece of cardboard, write GOD
on it, and then tape it on some random object that will then become the focus of your reverence. It’s easy, and just as useful.
And that’s what the book is. Here’s a physical phenomenon: let’s call it God! Here’s a common human belief: that’s God, too! Here’s a religious concept: if I take a machete to it and hack it into a shape I like better, I can call it God! It’s bizarre and painful to read. What I found most annoying was her claim that she’s going to invent a valid, plausible God (isn’t that what every founder of every religion claims?) by discarding the unbelievable parts of religion, but then what the book does is go through every unbelievable part and rationalizes it so that you can keep on going to church or synagogue, do exactly the same thing you’ve always done, continue to believe, and yet at the same time pat yourself on the back for having a scientific explanation for what you’re doing.
Is there a spiritual world? Does God answer prayers? Is there an afterlife? She asks these questions in various chapters, and more, but instead of the simple, clear answer of “NO“, she instead babbles solipsistically and glibly. So, for example, here’s how she answers the prayer question.
The emerging God is not a supernatural being who listens or possesses a wil, desires, or decision-making ability. So how can such a God help us?
Can it love us?
Can we love it?
Can it respond?
Can it answer our prayers?
The answers to the last four questions are yes, yes, yes, and yes. The answer to the first is that the answers to the last four are yes, yes, yes, and yes.
But words must be interpreted. We have to keep reorienting ourselves in the new universe, never assuming that we know what baggage-burdened words may mean in this new context.
I know. It makes no sense. But then you have to simply read her explanation for how to reconcile these contradictions, and you realize it makes even less sense. Her rationalization is that there is some kind of greater consciousness that is her God. Asking what is on the other side of the conversation when we pray, she says:
But on the other side there is a larger consciousness than what we think of as our own. Millions of people intuit this but then assume that the larger consciousness belongs to a separate God. Or they think of it as God. But projecting it completely outside ourselves causes confusion and incoherence, because no larger consciousness could be floating in space independent of human beings.
And then she babbles about stars and stardust and dark matter and dark energy, and something she calls a Cosmic Uroboros of Human Identity. Why? I don’t know. And she ends that chapter telling us to Pray, pray, pray.
The only thing I was praying for was an end to the book, but that’s just a chapter in the middle of section II of a three-section book, so that prayer went unanswered.
Worse, we have a cosmic destiny. Here’s the future of our planet:
We humans can go on forever, seeding the entire future visible universe with the kind of intelligence that generates God.
Don’t let this news get out. I can just imagine the star-faring, methane-breathing gas-bags of Betelguese getting word of our evangelical goal, and dispatching a fleet of planet-smashers to Sol to sterilize the third planet before they can poison the rest of the Milky Way.
What evil deed did you do to be forced to read this?
So, there is a consciousness listening to your prayers, but claiming it is a consciousness separate from human beings would be confusing and incoherent. So she’s basically telling people to worship themselves.
…
ATHEIST!
“Can it love us?
Can we love it?
Can it respond?
Can it answer our prayers?”
The writing style of the quotations keep making me think of Goodnight Moon for some reason.
She’s a bit behind the curve here – better thinkers than her have long since proposed similar ideas. I’m not sure if he’s the first, but Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity in 1841 argued against the “false or theological” form of Christianity and in favor of the “true or anthropological” form, worshiping God as residing in the human breast and being not an external entity, but a projected representation of all that is good about humanity. “To think is to be God.”(40)
Fun Feuerbach facts: He was an atheist (if in a slightly different sense than we’d think of it), he influenced Marx, and this is a quote from him: “[whenever morality] is based on theology, whenever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established… To derive anything from God is nothing more than to withdraw it from the test of reason, to institute it as indubitable, unassailable, sacred, without rendering an account of why” (274).
(I got all these quotes from Andrew von Hendy’s The Modern Construction of Myth, page 54, though he provided some page numbers in the original.)
Hey, it’s got forewords from both Paul Davies and Bishop Desmond Tutu, so it can’t be all bad… I think… I hope…
Doesn’t she make a good case for atheism? She dismisses all the gods we have invented so far and then fails at creating a new believable definition of god just like anyone before her. So there is nothing left. Good for us, no?
[…]
I’ll admit, when I posted about that mess of a book in Thunderdome, I was curious as to what the ‘big answer’ would be. This is it, really? “Golly, people invent god!” I think this is even worse than The Secret.
PZ: Don’t let this news get out. I can just imagine the star-faring, methane-breathing gas-bags of Betelguese getting word of our evangelical goal, and dispatching a fleet of planet-smashers to Sol to sterilize the third planet before they can poison the rest of the Milky Way.
Didn’t you get the word? We are it — the only intelligent life in this vast cosmos. Marshall Savage informed us of this liberating truth, and commanded us to go forth from this planet, carrying the emerald banner of Earth across the Milky Way. /sarc
And he told us how.
That’s like saying “dispatching a fleet of planet-smashers to Sun”… it sounds reaaaally weird.
Nothing new about that, really; low-grade cargo-cult Science was part of LDS (planets!!!) and Nation of Islam (the Black Scientist Yakub!!!) from the beginning, not to mention the Church of Scientology and Vedic Science. She may not have the entrepreneurial spirit of Messrs. Smith, Elijah Muhamed, Hubbard, Vivekananda, et al., but she apparently likes science-as-source-of-shiny-objects just as much as any of them.
I thought the post would be about these frogs. . .
(That’s not flying . . . It’s falling . . . with style. . .)
For those who get the message ‘This video contains content from BBC Worldwide, who has blocked it in your country…’ message at Owlmirror’s link, this should work. It really is worth watching; especially, IMO, the snake.
“The question “Does God exist?” is a hopeless distraction that will never lead anywhere positive.”
Allow me to translate:
The question “Does God exist?” led me to a conclusion that I didn’t like, so I was forced to obfuscate.
That makes about as much sense as the Chewbacca defense:
In other words, if we reinterpret the terms until they no longer have any relation to their original meaning, then we can fit them to whatever we like. This is Craig all over again: Drown your audience under a wave of equivocation until language has become so devoid of meaning that nobody can claim you’re wrong anymore.
It’s not smart, it’s not interesting, and it tells us nothing about the world other than the fact that there are some profoundly dishonest people inhabiting it.
A frog that could fly
If you want something to exist but can find no empirical evidence for it (or if empirical evidence for it cannot exist), just define it into existence. It’s a trick that theologians have been using forever.
Hopefully the authors approach will catch on, and all the religious will each devise their own religions, and like billions of snowflakes, blow away in the wind.
Betelgeuse is less than 10 million years old. Therefore, any inhabitants — gas bags or otherwise –must’ve colonized the system from elsewhere. Which means they do indeed have interstellar transport capability, so we better watch out.
Sure, that could actually exist. That much was already obvious, given almost no argument/book-length-treatment, and it doesn’t matter. It’s definitely not some groundbreaking new discovery. What really matters is that there aren’t any gods. There could have been such things, as every reasonable person already understood and was not interested in arguing about (much less conducting wars, etc.), but there aren’t actually any such things. That’s what matters, in the sense of actually having an enormous impact on the entire planet that real people live on: if (somehow) everybody believed and had a shared understanding of a specific god tomorrow (or stopped believing in them), that would be radically different from the world we live in.
Seems rather parochial to me. Why not include the past, as well as everything beyond the visible part of the universe? I mean, it’s not as if abstract aspirational nonsense like this obeys physics (or any clear logical structure) to begin with, so what’s stopping you, right at this moment, from having seeded all of it with “the kind of intelligence that generates God” the result of which then proceeded to make the universe?
And if that were really the interesting question, why couldn’t there be other realms of things which “exist” but have no relation to this universe at all? If there could be, what about them? I mean, why wouldn’t those get our God-generating semen too? Are they not deserving of it, for some reason?
So is this advocating, “Playing God”? That we can develop technology that everyone else will call the inventors “God”?
— I’ve read too much Lord of Light, by Zelazny.
Vogons. I’m expecting Vogons.
How true. So just answer it in the negative and move on to more fruitful thoughts.
Betelgeuse will be going supernova in a relatively short period of time. This would mean that any inhabitants, who must have chosen to colonize the system from elsewhere, have chosen to colonize a star that could explode at any moment.
Which means they are either incredibly foolish and reckless, or they’re not worried about a star exploding in their faces.
That…. is good cause to watch out!
Due to cosmic expansion, 97% of the visible universe is unreachable to us, even assuming that we can travel at the speed of light.
So, no.
If I was able to sit and string words one paper with any clarity and had the endurance to do it I would have been able to write such a book. I went through that thought passage years ago until I realized that it did not lead any where at all. It was a distraction that I was unconsciously using at the time. trying not to follow where the logic was leading and avoid the guilt and judgement I had learned to feel for doubting the consensus.
it is a very tangled thicket to wonder in, a very intricate maze
the only way out I found was similar to Alexander’s solution for the Gordian knot.
the illusion of god has a great attraction for humans
uncle frogy
Abrams will no doubt turn up on CBC Radio One’s Tapestry one of these days. I suspect she’d be right up Mary Hines’s alley.
My spouse is a Christian, and this kind of rationalization has occasionally been helpful to us, as a common ground making it possible for us to share something in the spiritual dimension. Of course it is not compatible with the belief in prayer, miracles, immaculate conception, etc. I’d say, if your rationalization eliminates 90% of your religion, and you have to twist the meaning of all words to make the remaining 10% kinda work, maybe you should just drop your religion (if you can).
Deism meets “The Secret”.
@Amphiox:
Reminds me of this:
@Owlmirror #30.
In either case, would you have time to be blinded?
I was just getting used to the flying pigs…
so now we’re The Godmakers Frank Herbert wrote about?
I for one welcome our Betelguesian sterilisers.
I remember, vaguely, reading a book (possibly by Peter Ward, can’t remember) that had speculations about the course of earth’s biosphere’s future, in terms of the carbon cycle, the warming sun, etc.
One chapter was about unexpected evolutionary breakthroughs. And of course they said that these things could not be predicted. But as an illustrative example, they went on a flight of fancy one of example of a possible “groundbreaking” evolutionary innovation, on par with oxygenating photosynthesis, or endosymbiosis, and chose amphibian lineages getting the ability to manufacture and store hydrogen gas in their throat pouches, enabling them to go ballooning.
ie, flying frogs!
We’ll be lucky if we make it another thousand years>
imnotspecial #6 wrote:
Yes, but no. From what I can tell the entire point of this book is to make a case against atheism — particularly that laughable form of gnu atheism which thinks “does God exist?” is a useful question. Why — haha — we’ve gone so far beyond this childish sort of thinking that “does and “God” and “exist” means anything you want it to! That’s how wrong atheism is!
This is exactly the sort of book that believers think shows their nuances, sensitivity, and ability to think deeply. They’re thinking in deepities, flipping back and forth from redefining nature or values as “God” and then suddenly talking about a “larger consciousness than we think of as our own.” It’s the Universal Mind from A Course in Miracles!
Or not. Whatever works.
I’d think this insipid redefinition game was a lot more amusing if its goal wasn’t to elevate faith and religion and denigrate clarity and reason. A God That Could Be Real should be subtitled Anything But Atheism.
Even if we did, spreading to the stars like that very likely means geographic speciation.
There’s no way we’d remain “human” by the modern understanding of the word.
Not necessarily a bad thing, though.
It sounds entirely standard to me, and I’m surprised it doesn’t to you. Standard or not, it can be rationalized by noting (well, by claiming) that “Sol” is the name of (our) sun, just as “Luna” is the name of our earth’s moon, and (for that matter) “Terra” or “Tellus” is the name of our earth. Capitalizing “sun”, “moon”, and “earth” (on that account) would not be because they are proper nouns, but in the same honorific manner as “lord” and “God” are capitalized when used to refer to (not-)our god. Since (with rare and quickly obsolescing examples, like “the Ukraine”) proper nouns (even if capitalized) don’t take an article, “to Sol” has no article, but “to the Sun” (or, better, “to the sun”) does.
the idea of god as the universal consciousness predates A Course in Miracles which is just re packaged eastern thought from India same is true for Depak (I hope that spells his name wrong)
funny how the new ideas are not very new at closer inspection and still go to the same no place.
uncle frogy
I took ‘to Sol’ to be used in the same context that an SF writer would say ‘to Alpha Centauri,’ when they strictly mean ‘to the Alpha Centauri solar system.’ No different, really, than ‘Send it to London,’ being understood as ‘Send it to our London office.’
But frogs CAN fly! They just click their heels together and believe!
I don’t mean to derail things (or do I?), as indeed this book looks like the garden variety pin the god on the donkey (Is god physics? Is god love? Is god a stubborn termite beneath my sink, that refuses to get out into the open for its inevitable squishing!!). But these days, I’m becoming a bit jaded to the whole “point at the silly theists and laugh” thing. Because, a), it’s way too easy. So much so that it seems more masturbation than anything else (which isn’t to say that no one should do the “pointing at theists” job, just … not me).
But, b): I’m starting to think it’s hypocritical of me to be secular on the one hand (which I will *always* be; it’s how I’m built), and to disparage the jewish culture that gave birth to me on the other, a culture which will *always* have a belief in god (because, take away the torah and the talmud and the rest, and you’ve gutted the thing). Sure, I can laugh at orthodox jews, and rightly criticize the myriad of problems in those communities (gender inequality, Israeli settelments, etc). But to wish them gone (or their belief in god) would be tantamount to wishing that the jewish culture go extinct 100 years from now (because who’s going to really keep it going, secular people like me?). And that’s the last thing I’d want.
Anyway… 1st person rants… where would the internet be without them? (…probably better off).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
…on top of a magnetic field of, what, 7 tesla?
gakxz1: *ahem*
Fuck me. BAND NAME!
gakxz1 #44 wrote:
Humanist Jews are both secular and Jewish, in that they celebrate their traditional culture along with what they consider to be symbolism, poetry, and ritual. Although one can argue that being Jewish entails believing in God, a lot of atheists (like my friend Herb Silverman) disagree. It probably comes down to a semantic disagreement rather than one over content.
Have you ever considered Humanistic Judaism?
Sastra, #48
Thanks; yeah, a part of me is strongly considering something like that, though in my mind I picture that’s something I’ll take on in 20 years, after I’ve sorted out everything else (which is effectively a lazy punt into a distant future; hense the tension). I do imagine that there’s a great debate on whether Judaism entails belief in god…
gakxz1 #49 wrote:
As I see it this debate among atheists seldom gets more than irritable. Being a ‘cultural Jew’ is maybe rather like celebrating a ‘secular Christmas,’ in that the battlefield isn’t over the beliefs so much as the terminology. It’s not a particularly heated debate because it quickly starts to devolve into matters of taste — or strategy .
I think the debate within Judaism is more pointed. Pious people aren’t necessarily keen on removing God from religion. They’re more likely to insist that it “guts” their identity.
Sastra #50
Sorry if that remark came off as sarcastic, it wasn’t ment to be (I use ellipsis so much it’s hard to tell anymore). Anyway, not sure! Perhaps a last hypothetical that illustrates my present state of mind: say that for whatever reason there’d no longer be an Israel. There’s be a big part of me (a person raised in a completly secular family, who hasn’t spent a day in synagogue since 13) that would want to drop everything and dedicate the rest of my life to Orthodox Judaism. That includes a belief in God and the whole 9 yards. Just to protect the culture, which I see as far more important than my own personal “belief in God”.
One of the great benefits of being profoundly alienated from the culture of my ancestors (German Catholics going back a good thousand years) is that I don’t have to try to worry about the culture dying out. I mean, yeah, the music is pretty amazing and the architecture has its good points, but Jeebus they killed a lot of people for reasons that make no sense and oh man so much with the hurting women.
So I’m ok with just kinda letting that culture wither away, if that’s what happens.
Nah, clearly a sovereign citizen.
Bah, that was @richardelguru #3
Argumentum ad Humpty Dumpty.
Ah, I see. The answers to the questions are “yes”, for values of “yes” equal to “no”.
So…. frozen solid?
@Owlmirror (#30):
To nitpick, I don’t see how you can figure nine orders of magnitude without specifying either the type of the supernova or the yield of the H-bomb.
Amphiox (#36): I remember, vaguely, reading a book (possibly by Peter Ward, can’t remember) that had speculations about the course of earth’s biosphere’s future, in terms of the carbon cycle, the warming sun, etc.
I’m fairly sure the book you’re thinking of is The Life and Death of Planet Earth by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee (Times Books, 2002).
@caseloweraz #58: *shrug* Take it up with Randall Munroe.
Although I did to some wiki browsing, and it would appear that in the list of hydrogen bomb detonations, the maximum yields were all more or less the same order of magnitude, even the Tsar Bomba “only” being 50Mt.
See also: BOOMS (in joules)
Well, AFAIK, all H-bombs so far detonated on earth have yields in the megatons, and the largest ever was 50 megatons, so the variation in all the H-bombs ever detonated on earth fits into about one order of magnitude, ie for the 9 order of magnitude, it washes out in measurement error….