Into The Mystic
I was half-watching a documentary about one of Dan Brown's books of piffle (probably 'Angels And Demons' but I wasn't really paying a great deal of attention) that (undoubtedly because I wasn't paying a great deal of attention) inexplicably seemed to segue into a nun waxing indignant about the Higgs boson. Now it's always pleasant to be presented with evidence that scientists have a sense of humour, but nicknaming the thing 'the God particle' was possibly one jape too far as it presented this poor woman with a large number of sticks, the wrong ends of which she was waggling vigorously and embarrassingly in public.
This reminded me of a piece I read quite some time ago in which Deepak Chopra was trying to pray the Copenhagen interpretation in aid of the proposition of Eastern philosophy that reality is constructed by the mind rather than the other way around (it's not actually as absurd an idea as it may sound!). The comprehensive rogering that he received on various militantly atheistic blogs as a result should persuade him to leave quantum theory to the three people who understand it in future but - lovely man though he undoubtedly is - I suspect he's too stubborn to give in so easily. Anyway, it has to be said that while in principle I support the debunking of woo wherever it is to be found I often read these blogs with irritation because it seems to me that in pursuit of rationality their authors dive into a kind of reductionism that throws the baby out with the bath-water and then dismantles the plumbing too.
As may have become clear over the course of previous posts I'm not exactly a fan of religion - in fact I can quite understand, if not quite approve, the desire to burn every prophet in history on top of a bonfire of every religious text ever written - and I find the traditional ideas about the existence and nature of God (or gods) ludicrous and, in the case of the Old Testament Thunderer, despicable. When it comes to making claims about the nature of reality then I want to see empirical evidence in support of those claims before anybody starts making laws and judging people on the basis of them, and so far evidence for the existence of a deity or deities equals a big fat zero. Nevertheless, perhaps because of mystical experiences (or bouts of temporary insanity if that's your preferred interpretation) I had as a child, I'm reluctant to completely dispose of the numinous, or at least of the notion that both human beings and the universe itself are somehow more than the sum of their parts.
So where does that leave me:
Belief in the existence of a personal, kind and loving God? Not a chance!
Belief in existence of the universe? Yes, if only on the grounds that denying it leads to some serious philosophical problems and might possibly cause me to end up in an institution where the walls are made of rubber.
Belief that the universe possesses consciousness and intelligence? Well, some parts of it certainly do but whether it does as a whole I don't know.
Belief in survival of the personality after death? It doesn't seem likely.
Belief in the survival of some kind of essential me after death? I don't know.
Belief that I'm a part of something greater? Definitely yes!
Where all of this is leading me is something I'm still trying to work out, and part of that working out process will be a post about where I think reductionism might have it wrong and mysticism might have it right.
This reminded me of a piece I read quite some time ago in which Deepak Chopra was trying to pray the Copenhagen interpretation in aid of the proposition of Eastern philosophy that reality is constructed by the mind rather than the other way around (it's not actually as absurd an idea as it may sound!). The comprehensive rogering that he received on various militantly atheistic blogs as a result should persuade him to leave quantum theory to the three people who understand it in future but - lovely man though he undoubtedly is - I suspect he's too stubborn to give in so easily. Anyway, it has to be said that while in principle I support the debunking of woo wherever it is to be found I often read these blogs with irritation because it seems to me that in pursuit of rationality their authors dive into a kind of reductionism that throws the baby out with the bath-water and then dismantles the plumbing too.
As may have become clear over the course of previous posts I'm not exactly a fan of religion - in fact I can quite understand, if not quite approve, the desire to burn every prophet in history on top of a bonfire of every religious text ever written - and I find the traditional ideas about the existence and nature of God (or gods) ludicrous and, in the case of the Old Testament Thunderer, despicable. When it comes to making claims about the nature of reality then I want to see empirical evidence in support of those claims before anybody starts making laws and judging people on the basis of them, and so far evidence for the existence of a deity or deities equals a big fat zero. Nevertheless, perhaps because of mystical experiences (or bouts of temporary insanity if that's your preferred interpretation) I had as a child, I'm reluctant to completely dispose of the numinous, or at least of the notion that both human beings and the universe itself are somehow more than the sum of their parts.
So where does that leave me:
Belief in the existence of a personal, kind and loving God? Not a chance!
Belief in existence of the universe? Yes, if only on the grounds that denying it leads to some serious philosophical problems and might possibly cause me to end up in an institution where the walls are made of rubber.
Belief that the universe possesses consciousness and intelligence? Well, some parts of it certainly do but whether it does as a whole I don't know.
Belief in survival of the personality after death? It doesn't seem likely.
Belief in the survival of some kind of essential me after death? I don't know.
Belief that I'm a part of something greater? Definitely yes!
Where all of this is leading me is something I'm still trying to work out, and part of that working out process will be a post about where I think reductionism might have it wrong and mysticism might have it right.
Are you familiar with the Seth material.
ReplyDeleteSeth was an entity channeled by a woman named Jane Roberts. Much of those writings spoke of a reality that exists because we agree mutually that it does, and went further to claim that in time we would come to understand the scientific backing behind such seemingly outlandish claims.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Roberts#Seth_Material
Yes, kind of, but ...
ReplyDeleteI'm bugged both by science which, in its emphasis on objectivity, tends to undervalue the importance of mind and by New Agery which tends to reduce everything *to* mind. To say that we construct a reality for ourselves is, I think, true but it's one which is based on, and subject to being overruled (and even blotted out of existence) by whatever the hell it is that underlies the structures that we mutually build and *call* reality.
I'm also trying to assimilate the news that what I think of as me is largely an illusion of no real importance, which was fascinating as a hypothesis when I first encountered it long, long ago but has now become rather unnerving now that science is confirming it as fact. How *that* fits into anything I don't really know.
The older I get the more I realise that I don't really know anything about anything.