I must confess that the God-Hypothesis, as a working hypothesis, does provide several advantages for as long as we do not fall into the trap of literalism. As a working hypothesis, it provides us with a provisional conjecture to guide investigation into our existence and judge our development.
The idea of bringing a metaphysical view of human deeds, either coming from a creator or ultimate reality, calls us to ask ourselves how such a hypothetical person would judge our thoughts, attitudes and deeds, even if just going by our own standards. In the style of Jesus, the question would run along the lines of, “If A is true, as you believe, how would God judge your behaviour?”
I have often come to think that the way Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels doesn’t necessarily provide a proof that Jesus was making anything more than conjecture, leaving the pious to judge themselves (rather than others) in the light of new suppositions. The same goes really for moral judgement by any ultimate reality.
On the other hand, reality as we witness it today, still hasn’t lost any of its mystery and wonder, and the fact of awareness throws up a million questions. The strange spiritual experience that people have, however they define it, still provides a haunting suspicion of greater wonders yet to be discovered before our time is up.
Does God have to be a “being” or “person” or can we live with God as a working hypothesis?
I would think that for most, on some level, there is an element of working hypothesis. If they introspected, even very confident believers, they would notice that if something miraculously works out or if they strongly feel the presence of God, their reaction is not simply, Yup, expected that, but rather something with some surprise, relief that it does, after all, seem to be true, and other feelings that might go along with a working hypothesis.
But I personally don’t see much use in the core sense of a theism being a working hypothesis. To not be literal. You mention this idea of literallness, which it seems to me is another kind of issue.
I have no idea what it would mean to believe in God metaphorically. Might as well view whatever your belief is as a specific literal idea of God. Perhaps you think that the bearded white guy in heaven is a metaphor or the Trinity is, or Brahma vs. Krishna is a choice between metaphors. But the actual belief in God, it seems to me, makes no sense as figurative.
If for example you think God has nothing like a personhood, but is an everywhere present conscious compassion or concern, or crankiness for that matter, then that makes for a fine literal belief. To have a more mystical, less God has a hammer and can call down lightning, type image of God can be literal and I don’t what gain is made by thinking of it figuratively.
many people who might be called seekers may have God as a working hypothesis and they go off the ashrams or monstaries or the mountains with the goal of testing/exploring this hypothesis. Seeking experiences that confirm. But if someone has already had these experience to the point where they simply believe - just as they, for example, believe other minds exist or that trees are conscious in some way or that dreams are dealing with deep emotional issues - then I don’t see what is wrong with that per se and what advantage they would have stepping back and again considering it a working hypothesis.
What I was trying to get at was that I believe that there are a lot of “believers” who do have God as a working hypothesis and have no other connection to the Ineffable. There are people who I observe being quite obtuse in everything they do, and then they go out and start discussing religion in the same fashion. When I speak to them about the possibility that what we refer to as God is far more complex than the archaic ideas that have hardly developed in two thousand years, and that there may be an observable development going on, sending ripples out into humanity and producing waves of spirituality, each discovering new aspects of the mystery we call God, most “believers” become defensive or even aggressive.
I asked one group whether they thought that Christ would have been so defensive, or whether he would have grasped they spirituality of the day and given it new inspiration, they just started quoting scriptures – and I found that they were quoting out of context too. Then some statements came about them being more pious than I, some diffuse talk about “new-age” and hints (they didn’t speak plainly) about purgatory driving such heretic ideas out of people.
There was hardly anyone willing to talk about the fact that God is elusive and invisible, remaining out of reach, just around the corner, or in the corner of our eyes. Instead there was talk about the great wonders recorded in the Bible or dubious stories about people who knew people who had witnessed miracles. Their faith or belief was second-hand.
I think that it is the long sessions of meditation and contemplation after years of reading the Bible alone and with other people that forced me to see that the stories were carrying truths that we noticed only after putting the Bible down, and confronting life. It was in the conflict with disease and old age that those stories reached me in a way that seemed to astound other people. But it didn’t help to regard the stories as literally true; rather they served as patterns or models, or as archetypes for the enormous variety amongst human beings.
Indeed, many of the stories have become too archaic to be anything else than archetypes, but as such there was and still is great comfort in them. I realised that the Gospels provided the framework for rites and ceremonies and that worship was to some degree the re-enactment of life-formulas, the observance of rituals and trust in basic truths. This is all “God” in various facets, but not in any way the “old man in the sky”, but a much deeper truth.
I could see people re-enacting scenes in these stories, even if they were unaware they were doing it, and then I saw how they did the same with contemporary rites and rituals too. I remember watching a group of British people on the River Kwai of all places, and seeing them going through the rituals of telling their stories. It reminded me of a time way back in my life when, as a child, I would watch adults go through the same procedures.
It is probably well known that I have always said that human beings are story-tellers. Religion is just that.
I wonder if it is actually an experience, or whether time reveals that we are more receptive to the elusive “spirits” of our world than we thought. We experience the movement of benevolence and malevolence and with time we can even feel it from a distance. We can develop our concentration, become mindful and even control our reactions to allow things to pass, and guide them to peace. We learn to communicate in silence, speak without words, and achieve much without action.
This is all within the reach of humanity, and religion can be the way to such development, but it is less a belief than an intuition or a notion based upon experience and having learnt the lessons of accumulated wisdom. It is unimportant whether we perceive God as a person, or as the prime-mover, the ineffable or the ultimate being, because we do not know God, other than “from behind”, or as the whisper on a hillside, as a dream or vision, or as a mysterious presence.
That is why I believe that it is acceptable to see God as a hypothesis to work by, as a method to fathom out the mysteries of our existence, an object of faith and awe, but also a metaphor for the complexity of the universe that fascinates and scares us at the same time.
In Germany there is a saying, “Glauben ist nicht Wissen” and still I experience many Christians who sport their belief as though it were knowledge. It is quite obvious that many things we believe, we cannot know, but we use them as a working hypothesis - if we would but be aware of it. I think that this step towards becoming aware of this and other related facts, such as how our perception works, and how it sometimes fools us; how our memory works and often we fill in the gaps; how the information from our senses is very often selective, depending on what we assume we should see, hear, taste etc.; how we rely heavily on what used to be or what we are used to and fail to check, how it is now.
There are many things we can learn about ourselves that on the one hand should lead us to humility and on the other hand, should make us more amiable towards people who fall into the same traps as we have gone through. This is what I see as a major step towards progressing out of the “culture clash” as it has been called. If we can understand that our cultures are interpretations of the reality we are confronted with and that we need working hypotheses to work it out, we could transcend the struggle we have at present and actually come to see that we are all conditioned with large variances, but that there is a common ground to work things out.
In this way, we could accept that the Hindu, Jewish, Christian or Muslim God(s) have attribute that portray the development of a certain time and situation, and that they all have cultural importance, but that we are all moving towards a more mutual understanding. Utopia? Yes, but one to aim for in my view!
You can reach this point with a modern atheistic liberal…alternative health, UFOs, conspiracies, the persistence or not of the self through time, certain kinds of ethical questions (like trying to get a working definition of terrorism while offering them examples like Dresden. But it takes a bit more work. You have to make them think you are very serious and have some strength to your arguments. Once it is not so easy to dismiss, you can find yourself encountering scripture like memes - though generally, but not always, without the kinds of implicit spiritual threats one gets from fundamentalists of the religious kind.
I bring this up not to defend religiously rigid people, but to draw attention to the point where the person is threatened in some more fundamental way.
There is not so much organized empiricism in mainstream Abrahamic religions. Sufis, some Hassidim, some cults and sects in Christianity do have structured programs of empirical exploration. For the rest God is fairly transcendent only. They may feel presences or Jesus in their hearts, but there is no training, for example, to get better at such experiencing.
Which is why debates between Christians, for example, and atheist focus so much on beliefs and faith and have these verbal meme wars, activities that would be frowned on both epistemologically and ethically by the exceptions I mentioned above and also by members of other religions. They have concrete programs for gaining knowledge/belief and arguments are not part of them.
Oh, sure. I am not trying to say it is unacceptable. It doesn’t work for me, though as I said there is an element of it, I think, in most theists. But I wouldn’t want to try to convince someone it is wrong. I was more resisting it as what people should shift their beliefs to. I mean, if they want to, fine. But I don’t find it superior per se, though with some people, I would find it a step up - for my sake at least - if they changed to this.
I definately get your point about people feeling threatened by this kind of position, although it is often a feeling of foreboding because they fear they will be taken to task on their beliefs. That Is why I never confront people (except in a discussion forum) - in fact yesterday I held a mini-service in the old peoples home I manage and preached them the pentecostal story. I obviously included nuances of my own interpretation but I was careful not to offend them and they were all very impressed that the manager is also a “Pastor”.
It is when I am confronted that I advance my ideas and come out with the fact that they would probably regard me as atheist or agnostic at best, although I would dispute that. The conversations I have had so far have definately confirmed for me that many having this working hypothesis and only a few feel threatened in the way you mentioned. However, that is Europe. In other countries I would probably be killed.
A “working hypothesis” is for designers, engineers, architects, trouble-shooters, and thinking people. “Beliefs” are for the much greater mass of others.
If someone feels there needs to be a creator, then I understand that need and think that I just solve that need differently. I would just ask whether a creator has to have the attributes the Bible gives it/him/her, or whether the ideas of the metaphysical thousands of years ago could take an update to accomodate modern science.
The thing is that I think I understand the theistic meindset, albeit I think that we have progressed and have to acknowledge that. There is a mystical aspect of existence, which science hasn’t been able to fathom out. I have no doubt there will be discoveries at some time, but I ask myself whether we will be able to take them as complacently as some of the discoveries in quantum physics - taking into account that most of us can’t grasp these discoveries or theories. I think that this is going to be how we progress (indeed how it has been for some time): The more we know, the more questions we will have and the more we will be in awe at what we discover.
It is this awe that has been the start of theism from the start - and it doesn’t seem to be changing in the near future. Only, we need to get away from tribal notions as absolutes and understand them as necessary developments along the way.
It is substantially impractical to have more than a small percentage of analytical thinkers in a society. Imagine an army wherein every soldier was a general (of course that would put an end to wars really quickly, but only if they other armies did the same).
The problem isn’t actually one of knowing what to believe.
The problem is in knowing who to believe (how and why).
Oh, the God-Hypothesis provided us with so much advantages over history, I agree.
From crusades to witch hunts to torture devices (BDSM anyone?) to 9/11 etc. etc. Not to mention how it helps control the weak minded and naive even now, in 21st century.
Don’t know an answer to a question? God did it.
How are humans so complex? Gawd.
How did the universe came to be? Gawd.
See? It’s so simple and easy. Why study anything, why attain knowledge when you can just fill every hole with god. Good thing scientists don’t work that way though, or we wouldn’t have computers to worship Gawd online, right?
The only semi-good thing that God hypothesis has done is provide comfort for the weak and desperate. And I say semi-good because it also made them slaves in this world while promising better life in the afterlife when infact there most probably isn’t an afterlife and if there is it almost certainly has nothing to do with any religion…
The problem with your criticism is that it claims to be the only thing that can be said about religion. I am as critical as you about the past record of religions, but what you listed isn’t the only story. How do you change it? You can try to ban it, destroy it or what ever, but the chances are, you will only promote religion in the sight of another injustice.
I believe you have to get the full picture and differenciate, as you would with any human being, showing inappropriate behaviour as the crime it is and praise appropriate behaviour - wherever it comes from. I have a football club in the village that is very charitable and I have politely pointed out to the church in the village, that it hasn’t got the monopoly on charity.
This caused a reasonance in as much that the church has promised to engage itself more for the residents of my elderly peoples home. It brought about a change that I wouldn’t have achieved by the kind of scathing criticism you have brought - even if I agree with you.
Bob, I was talking about what seemed to me to be the subject, which is God hypothesis. Your point was about church. I am criticizing the essence of the idea of god and religion itself.
No, I do not wish to ban religion. People have the right to believe and do what they want as long as they don’t harm others. But then we have borderline situations, like some religious bakery refusing to sell a cake to an atheist/gay couple because of religious conviction. What then? Such religious convictions are simply incompatible with any modern view of society and just inhibit progress. People basically hide their bigotry behind religious conviction and expect everybody else to respect it and treat it as scared.
Besides, trying to ban religion would most likely make Christians happy because they just LOOOOVE to play the victim/martyr, they’re obsessed with it.
As to your point about the church - the church can give to the poor and do other good things without the bad things (brainwashing masses with superstitious nonsense and ruining young minds with perverted logic). This is something I often see Christians do. There are bad things and good things in Christianity, and they attach them together instead of separating and rejecting the bad and only keeping the good.
How do these two ideas work together?
The church leaders are unhappy because they are in control and the brainwashed masses are happy because they are victims?
or
The church leaders are happy because they are in control and the brainwashed masses are unhappy because they are victims?
or
… unhappy … unhappy … ?
or
… happy … happy … ?
I don’t see your point. Why are you dividing them into church leaders and common folk?
Both are happy to play the victim. To pretend that they’ve always been oppressed, that they aren’t even allowed to pray in their schools (!!!). You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? I did not say that they like to BE the victims, just that they like PRETENDING that they are, don’t twist my words.
I actually agree that the owners have autonomy and that if they don’t want to sell it, they should not be forced to. But the fact that people don’t want to sell it to others just because of their race/religious affiliation/gender IS the problem. Especially when those convictions are irrational and are nothing more than plain bigotry and hatred hidden behind the term “religious conviction”.