We’re about to begin the afternoon session on Sunday – the final session. Some talks haven’t yet been noted in the blog – but they will be, as we come out of under the snow of other obligations, like collecting interviews for radio programs, for example.
But before the day moves on I want to note today’s beginnings of a move towards elaborating ways of practically living out that desire ‘to be the best person you can be’ – without God.
The day began with Stuart Bechman’s affirmation of why he was an atheist: amongst the reasons, his sense of the importance of making sure that moral understanding kept in pace with technological understanding. He acknowledged the ‘incredible power of community’ : ‘we know that we can have that community without religious belief.’ So it was interesting to hear his account of his organisation’s structures of ‘outreach’ – sponsorship, scholarships etc. You can find out more here.
Right now, as the afternoon session has got going, an American comedian is telling us about what makes him laugh (it’s an in-your-face taking up of in-your-face hypocrisy) … and that he will be selling his books later (who isn’t?) . But a while ago, Ian Robinson’s gentler humour led us to the idea that atheism is a logical conclusion to a spiritual quest. The word spiritual he said had been coopted by religious people and ‘twisted into something transcendental’. He defined it as a quest to find the essential nature of the universe, a search for answers to the big questions. And these questions extend to what is the ultimate nature of the universe, is there a divinity and so on. You’ve got to start without presupposing a material realm and a spiritual realm.
Atheism is also about passion, not just reason, Ian Robinson said. Passion and reason are not antagonists. The Western intellectual tradition is notorious for taking two contrasting aspects and turning them into opposites and in competition. (pace ‘faith without reaon is dead’ ?)
So atheism is a passionate engagement with the the world and with life … and the first passion is love. Atheists in Ian Robinson’s account are in love with truth and in love with the natural world, because that is all there is, and they are ‘with eyes wide open’.
Along with passion, there is reverence – for a natural world that is something wondrous and marvellous. Awe is too passive a notion he said, quoting Robert Solomon, whereas reverence implies an active stance towards the universe. And Darwin he said was the person who best expressed this stance: “It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank ………..”
An update:
Since some comment conversation is about Ian Robinson’s talk beyond that audience appreciated poetic point, here is a summary of what he had to say. He made three points about attempts to speak of God in terms of, for example, ‘being’ or ’ground of being’. One, if this purported God is non-trivial then he or she would be detectable by science; if non-detectable then irrelevant; and if detectable, some effects would be palpable.
Two, the idea that there is even such a thing as ‘being’ is a logical howler – it happens when a noun is created from a verb (hence Robinson’s reference to nominalisation and reification). Linguistics, he said, cannot create facts about the world and to say that God is being is to say nothing
Third, in his view, the God of the great majority of believers is susceptible to conventional arguments from atheists, since this is not the ‘ground of being’ or some such formulation.
Listen to audio of Ian Robinson speaking on “Atheism as the Logical Conclusion to a Spiritual Quest” [Size:36.9MB; Dur: 40.20]
“being good and spiritual” – why spiritual? To me “spiritual” has become a marketing word, like “natural”.
Both are warm fuzzy words that appeal to particular audiences. “Spiritual” has the added disadvantage of denoting an other worldly or supernatural orientation rather than an orientation toward the problems of this life, the only life we know for sure.
Atheists are quite capable of being good, of loving life, the world, and honest living in a mindful considered way. But I acknowledge that they lack an accepted language to convey this to those who think reverence is owed only to the supernatural.
I wonder what is truth and what is passion in a materialist world, whether determinist or indeterminist?
Neither truth nor passion are material, so perhaps they are simply ‘epiphenomena” or illusions brought about by the bewitchment of language.
Even if we accept that truth is real in a materialist world, is it important? If it is all just dust and atoms in the void, albeit combined into seemingly limitless permutations of mind-boggingly unimaginable complexity, what does it really matter what we believe.
In such a world there is no real MYSTERY, just unknowable and incalculable COMPLEXITY.
If a Darwinist were to argue that religion derives from an adaptive trick of nature making us believe in an illusory afterlife as a way of coping with our awareness of mortality and that this is necessary for human well being, isn’t it perverse of him to then disseminate this theory, which, if people accepted it, would undermine their adaptive advantage? A Darwinist, undoing the work of evolution?!
At least if I firmly believe in an afterlife I will never be proved wrong. If I am wrong I will die and be none the wiser, if I am right then I will perhaps be better prepared than those who disbelieve.
We need to grow up and stop believing in concretised ideas about metaphysical matters, or imagining that our notions are important enough to fight over. ALL metaphysical beliefs, one way or another ( materialism is also metaphysics because it makes statements about the nature of reality which are beyond the evidence of the senses) are supported by FAITH!
Political and religious leaders alike have used people’s need to believe firmly in some LITERAL THING to inflame them to fight against others who are perceived to threaten these precious beliefs. This goes for secular as well as religious beliefs. Think of National Socialism, Marxism or Democracy. It is not hard to see Atheism potentially hardening into another ideology, with its adherents believing that the future of humanity relies on the destruction of religion, and being prepared to at least kill, (if not die, because of lack of afterlife) for their beliefs.
I think Michael that Ian Robinson was trying precisely to retrieve the word ’spiritual’ from any implicaton of a transcendtal orientation.
I just want to add that the feelings of awe and reverence are generally accorded to that which we believe is, to an unimaginable degree, beyond our ability to understand.
If we think and feel that this amazing world, with all its complexity is the work of some perhaps infinite intelligence then we might feel a sense of humility, of fragility and consequently, of awe and reverence in the face of so great a force.
Note I said humility, not humiliation.
On the other hand, if we are convinced that everything came about by chance, is inherently meaningless, and is only incomprehensible to the degree that it is too complex for us to understand fully, then where is cause for feeling reverence in that? Reverence towards what? Towards the incalculable odds against such an incredible world coming into being without cause and out of nothing? Or simply always being there?
Of course the origin will ALWAYS be a mystery, no matter how much we find out about the actual world, and because it will always lie beyond our intellectual ken we can ignore it or exercise our poetic imaginations and religious sensibilities trying to imagine it, intuit it.
But this will never yield any certain empirical knowledge, obviously.
The excitement of gaining empirical knowledge is due to the satisfaction of the intellectual desire to understand how things actually work. This in itself is great, but it is rhetorical to exaggerate this satisfaction by characterizing it as awe and reverence. These latter feelings are only warranted when we see the overall order of things as intimations of an even greater order beyond our understanding.
These kinds of ‘feelings’ (inadequate word) can be heightened to the extreme degree of mystical rapture so well documented in all traditions.
Of course attempts to communicate such experiences are usually expressed in the language and symbolisms of the traditions in which they occur.
sysyphus, you are taking a very loose synopsis of what was a brilliant presentation by Ian Robinson, in which he directly addressed all of the straw-men you erect here and demonstrating the ‘not even wrong’ argument against which he spoke. You suffer the very problem of language he warned strongly against. Namely the mistake to jump from nominalisation to reification. Perhaps you ought to wait until his talk is available on DVD, or inevitably You Tube, before you philosophise yourself down a rabbit hole.
riddlemethis , please explain clearly to me how and on what points, I went wrong, I am here to learn.
I was commenting on his presentation, AS REPORTED ABOVE, having not been present myself.
Plese explain to me how I have jumped from “nominalisation to reification” and exactly how I have philosophised myself “down a rabbit hole”.
I am not being facetious, it is simply unclear to me what you mean.
Sysyphus, the limitations of the blog environment mean undertaking that type of discussion is difficult, but my point was clear. Why discuss the failings of somebody’s idea, when indeed you have no idea of what it actually was. Would you seriously critique someone like Robinson from a distillation by a third party?
Save to say that you make broad misrepresentations about the claims of abiogenesis (re: came about by chance), not to mention the fact that you seem to want to talk about meaning from only an intrinsic perspective – ie: that meaning must be given by someone in order to exist. Additionally, it is simply folly to categorically state what we can’t ever come to know. It’s an argument from ignorance & best not employed.
On the other point you’ll need to brush up on your linguistics, but in short the objectifying of feelings as though they had intrinsic properties which mean they can only ever be related to a specific context, does not mean that they actually take on the ascribed properties. Awe and reverence are perfectly compatible feelings (for that is all they are) to have for a purely material world & Robinson addresses this point in his speech beautifully. That these words have been coopted by the religious does not mean they are precluded from proper use in our language.
Riddlemethis, I wasn’t critiquing Robinson, just the few ideas reported.
You haven’t explained how I made “broad misrepresentations about the claims of abiogenesis”, I don’t know what your point is here.
I don’t understand what you are getting at by suggesting that I was saying: “meaning must be given by someone in order to exist”. Surely we give meaning to things, this is not intrinsic meaning, are you suggesting they could have intrinsic meaning unless given by God. (I don’t enjoy the blessing of having a firm belief in God, myself, by the way, but if I imagine the reality of a transcendent order I find it more inspiring because of the added infinite dimension and mystery).
I admit someone might feel awe and reverence in the face of the unknowable. But I find it hard it to imagine such feelings if they were characterised as just more complex physical processes and that’s it, or whatever. If the idea of the transcendent stirs profounder feelings then why not contemplate it, what possible harm could it do.
If not, “c’est la vie”.
Are you saying there are no limits to what we can know? Surely we can’t know transcendence, what it is, whether it is real, imaginary…we can make assumptions, we can dream, poeticise.
The origin of the universe is unknowable to us, because we can never know for sure if it was Big Bang, always existed, multiverse etc etc . It’s so far in the past, perhaps infinitely, how could we possibly know?
As to your last points, our language has grown out of 2000 years of Judeo/ Christian and Platonic/ Aristotelian, and subsequent philosphical, literary, scientific (more lately) and theological traditions, all with their ideas of transcendence. The rise of materialist ideas spans the last couple hundred years only(apart from minor develops in Ancient Greece), and has not been by any means dominant during that time in philosophy, music, art or literature and obviously not in theology.
I’m not denying anyone’s right to be an atheist and to have wonderful feelings about the world, I was merely saying I can’t understand it, it doesn’t work for me. Just presenting my perspective, is all.
And I understand from the explanation above about Robinson’s idea that our idea of being is a reification from the verb to noun etc. Sure, that’s one possible explanation for the more than 2000 year engagement with the idea, from Pre Socratics, on in the west, Brahmanists, Buddhists, Daoists etc and all the reported profound experiences, awakenings, and so on. If you’ve never had such experiences, or extensively read in the mystical traditions, it probably seems like all gibberish to you.
Consider, though, you might well be clinging to a limited perspective in ignorance, just wanting everything to be all safe and understandable.