Can there be religion without the supernatural?

On another thread, Tim suggested that religion requires the supernatural.

I'm not sure I agree - I'm agnostic because I think it's possible that some core experience which leads to religion is something that is natural, but hasn't yet been fully perceived or discovered.

What do you think? If you're religious, would your religion be diminished if part or all of it were to suddenly be demonstrated in a scientific way - the existence of souls, for example. If you're not religious, what would be your response if some component of religion - life after death, maybe - were demonstrated in a scientifically verifiable way?

I think that's a fair point. At it's core religion deals with two thing: Where did we come from and where do we go after we die. And the thing both of these have in common is consolation. Consolation that the origins of the universe provide some kind of purpose that makes sense of the way things are and consolation that we'll be ressurected or liberated etc. after death.

The supernatural is really just a tool towards rationalizing that consolation. Could just as easily be something else, like the Earth being constructed as a great computer to derive the meaning of life, the universe and everything or it could be aliens downloading our consciousness after we each die as some kind of anthropological conservation project.

Of course, besides cosmology there's also ritual, but that's just an attempt to affect outcomes within that cosmology. And while the supernatural is sometimes invoked to rationalize the function of rituals, I'm not so sure the supernatural is a prerequisite explanatory device there either.

"Religion" is one of those words that people toss around a lot without realizing it's a rather vague and nebulous (and sometimes useless) construct. So does religion require the supernatural? Well, if you think that "supernatural" is part of the definition of religion...yes.

But then what is "natural" and what is "supernatural"?

I think just defining these terms, before even approaching your question, could take a good 100 posts. Or more.

I think there has to be a sacred element to religion. Something that is ultimate, based only on itself. I do not think this needs to be a supernatural being, or something that rewards good behavior or good sacrifice. It can be a perceived fundamental order that someone might seek to be in close harmony with.

Can worship be replaced with meditation and contemplation, and still be transformative?

>4 richardbsmith:

I can't imagine why a god would want to be worshipped, so I really don't consider that to be a critical part of religion. I certainly think that meditation and contemplation can be transformative - after all, that's exactly what happened to Siddhartha, right?

Tim uses the term "supernatural" more expansively than I do. To me, calling things like "moral realism, consciousness, transcendent meaning, personal identity, teleology, life after death, etc." seems counterintuitive--although I agree with Tim's underlying argument that all those things are incompatible with philosophic materialism. I tend to refer to those things as "transcendent" rather than supernatural. To me, supernaturalism requires in some sense "the immaterial becoming material"and thus I use it only to refer to the claim that some set of empirical phenomena operate in a manner which is, in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, "beyond the order or laws of the whole created nature" (ST I:102:4)--a contravention of the material order on the part of immaterial forces or entities. To me, the claim that God miraculously made a statue cry blood is an example of supernaturalism; the claims that God exists in three hypostases united in one essence or that genocide is objectively evil are examples of transcendentalism.

Using that definition of supernaturalism, I think religion without supernaturalism is rare but certainly possible--indeed, I hold it to be my own position. Insofar as the notion of the supernatural assumes that there is a natural order to the universe independent not only of the efforts of human beings to describe it (i.e., scientific models) but also of the will of God whose actions are assumed to be in contravention of it, I find supernaturalism to be fundamentally incoherent, at least within a Christian context. Why would God create a natural order that She would then be required to contravene? It doesn't make any sense.

But does religion require the supernatural in Tim's more expansive sense--those things which I would refer to as transcendental? Can religion dispense with the transcendental completely? There have certainly been attempts to do so. I've heard some Mormons describe their religion as being non-transcendental; Scientology strikes me as potentially being non-transcendental; lawecon's brand of Judaism is not obviously transcendental either; one can fairly easily produce non-transcendental descriptions of animism and other forms of religion that formerly fell under the umbrella of "primitive." Of course, those of us who are transcendental religionists are prone to see such religious movements as being little more than pseudoscience, and if God is demoted from being the Ground of Being to being little more than a superpowered alien--what Tim called "a very large marbles-and-chutes set"--it becomes very hard to see why we should care what She wants or believe that She exists.

The worship aspect of religion is almost primary for me. Perhaps a better question is how to distinguish worship, meditation, and contemplation. How are they different?

The worship aspect of religion is primary for me, and does not hinge on supernatural qualities or events.

Of course it is possible. People make religion out of all kinds of things, such as football. But I think in the normal usage of the word it refers to someone or something which is greater than the ordinary.

~2 & 3

"I think that's a fair point. At it's core religion deals with two thing: Where did we come from and where do we go after we die. And the thing both of these have in common is consolation. Consolation that the origins of the universe provide some kind of purpose that makes sense of the way things are and consolation that we'll be ressurected or liberated etc. after death."

I think that is incredibly parochial. Let's see, Judaism, which some believe is the parent religion of Christianity, traditionally had nothing at all to do with "Where did we come from and where do we go after we die." Parts of it, interpretations of it, later picked up the latter concern from Greek culture, but it still is not a very important concern, even for those who assert that there will be some sort of afterlife.

Personally, I haven't a clue what the former concern means. Is this some sort of claim that all religion must believe in some sort of unbounded reincarnation? Why would that be necessary. Everything has a history. Every history has a beginning. The beginning for most of us is our first memories. End of story.

Further, consolation has very little to do with Judaism. I suppose that one might believe in and be consoled by the belief that Israel is eternal, but I doubt that is the sort of consolation you had in mind. If anything, the core of Judaism is "justice" and living the right life. I understand that sometime similar is true of the Eastern religions.

""Religion" is one of those words that people toss around a lot without realizing it's a rather vague and nebulous (and sometimes useless) construct. So does religion require the supernatural? Well, if you think that "supernatural" is part of the definition of religion...yes.

But then what is "natural" and what is "supernatural"?

I think just defining these terms, before even approaching your question, could take a good 100 posts. Or more"

I tried something like that once regarding what theists and atheists meant by "God." The thread went on for a couple thousand posts and the only responses were the traditional self-contradictory babble about "a being who is infinitely powerful, omnipresent, omni-compassionate, all knowing, all wise." In other words, no one was thinking, or even looking beyond their respective noses, just repeating their childhood bumperstickers. So don't get your hopes up.

>11 lawecon: the only responses

To be fair, lawecon, I don't think those were the only responses, although they may have made up the majority.

~12

Strange, I don't even recall you participating in that discussion. Did you? I am referring to this discussion: http://www.librarything.com/topic/102330

Opps, just when back and looked. I guess you did. But surely you don't think that the answer that "G-d is something bigger than we can imagine" is superior to the response I referred to? In fact, it is no response at all.

#11: If anything, the core of Judaism is "justice" and living the right life.

You're right, that's not consoling at all! Almost as unconsoling as being told that God has singled you out as one of his favorites. What was I thinking?

#1

I think a lot of the answer to your question depends on two definitions. "Religion" and "supernatural."

Here's why I say this:

Buddhism - Is it a religion? If yes, then was Buddha supernatural, or just a man who happened to offer good ideas about enlightenment? The statues of Buddha aren't worshiped, just used to mark the holy ground for the followers (from what little I've read recently. Need to research that a little more.)

Many of the eastern philosophies, which could also be seen as religions, don't necessarily have a "god" or "prophet" that they worship or follow. It's about enlightenment. So how would they fit the two definitions?

~14

Once again, Lunar, you babble without the slightest knowledge concerning what you're babbling about. Perhaps you could cite to Rothbard or Spooner for this ridiculous comment?

The Abrahamic religions all agree that there is a "higher power" who revealed certain truths and makes certain demands on humans.

Without giving a full definition of what is or is not supernatural, I say THAT is supernatural.

The Hindus wrote the book on supernatural.

Buddhism as expressed in most of the world ( though maybe not in certain neighborhoods in San Francisco or in Sedona) depends on the doctrines of reincarnation and on "Karma" and "Samsara"; i.e. your fate in this life depends on your accumulated good and bad deeds of past lives and you're next life depends on the good and bad deeds you do in this life.

That roster doesn't cover all the religions there are, ever were, or ever could be, but it covers a substantial part, a super majority if not more, I'll bet, of all the religious people alive on the planet today.

If there's a "religion" without a "supernatural" component, lets have its name and major teachings, please.

~18

"he Abrahamic religions all agree that there is a "higher power" who revealed certain truths and makes certain demands on humans.

Without giving a full definition of what is or is not supernatural, I say THAT is supernatural."

I suppose that is one way to look at it, but there seems to be two problems with that interpretation:

(1) Your description fits every government that has ever existed. Each government is self-defined as a "higher power" that can, by definition, do those things (take your property without your consent, take your health without your consent, take your life without your consent) that no ordinary human being is allowed to do. Each makes laws and/or gives commands. Each will whop you good and hard if you disobey. Supernatural? Apparently so in your definition system.

(2) Some interpretations of at least one of the Abrahamic religions hold that the higher being is, indeed, higher, in the same sense that a Harvard professor is higher to a hunter gatherer, that the truths are indeed truths about how things work or don't work, and that if you don't listen you get what the universe meets out to those who don't listen. Supernatural? Not according to my dictionary.

ref 18

As to point 1:
In this context "higher power" refers to the creator of all that is, the author of life, king of the universe and so on; which you know darned well.

What kind of silly game is it to pretend otherwise?

As to point 2
I think you're a century or two out of date with your anthropology. In any case, they are both homo sapiens with the same cognitive powers. Its just that the hunter gatherer knows more about how to live off the land with the help of a small group of kin or near kin, a situation which is likely to flumox the ordinary Harvard professor.

Neither one created the other or would be seen as holy by the other. Neither one was present at the creation of the world nor is expected to live forever.

If you're thinking of Mormonism, where an "ordinary" man can become the god of his own world after death, I call that supernatural, what else would it be?

Which branch of the Abrahamics thinks that god is just a man with a more literate culture supported by a more advanced technology and intricate social infrastructure?

There are some rabbis (I'm thinking of Kaplan for the Reconstructionists and Wine for the Humanistic Judaists) who reject the divine altogether, or at least reject revelation; but they are not exactly normative within the larger tradition.

I imagine there must be similar minority sentiments among some Christians as well.

If they reject supernaturalism entirely then they become something like Ethical Culture.

I suppose one could argue whether EC is properly deemed "a religion" or not, but surely its not an "Abrahamic" one in that it rejects the existence of the God of Abraham and rejects revelation.

~19

As to (1), I am playing the silly game of referring to and applying the implications of the definition you offered. What kind of silly game are you playing?

As to (2): In what manner, precisely, am I "a century or two out of date with your anthropology" and what the fuck does that have to do with this discussion?

You seem to be making a variety of assumptions without any basis. Why do you, for instance, think that I believe that "god is just a man with a more literate culture supported by a more advanced technology and intricate social infrastructure." I don't recall saying anything about God being a man or my being a Mormon. In fact, as you have been posting to these forums for about as long as I have you have every reason to know that I am not a Mormon.

I appreciate your observations on the spectrum of Judaism and various sorts of humanism, but, frankly, I don't think that you have a clue. If you did have a clue, for instance, you would know that Reconstructionism is one variety of Judaism, and Judaism is a religion. However, I am also not a Reconstructionist and never implied in any way that I was a Reconstructionist.

So far you have proved that you are very good at constructing and demolishing strawmen. Do you think you might now come to grasp with what people are actually saying and the implications of what you are saying? Otherwise I'm going to have a really hard time distinguishing your mental state from that of, say, fuzzi.

#16: Once again, Lunar, you babble without the slightest knowledge concerning what you're babbling about.

What else is there to know? Judaism holds that Jews are the "chosen people" of Yahweh. You might have some more dry academic accretions on the periphery, but you can't really refute that like other religions it's mostly about consolation. I agree it's parochial. Religion often is.

~21

(1) "Chosen people" is a technical term in Judaism, like "the State" is in libertarianism. You'd know that if you knew anything about Judaism. It does not mean that the Jewish People are ubermensche. It means that they have taken on a special burden of understanding and implementing Torah - of becoming a "nation of Priests." It is an aspirational status. G-d may have chosen, but the object of his choice retains free will and must implement the choice. So far the record has not been great. All of that is very mainstream Judaism, not dry, academic and on the periphery - something else you'd know if you had a clue.

(2) I suppose that is "about consolation," somewhat like your religious attachment to and fervor about libertarianism is about consolation. There are even great figures - like Rothbard and Spooner - whose wisdom is often referred to.

Incidentally, how did you get so deeply religious?

ref 20

As to (1), I am playing the silly game of referring to and applying the implications of the definition you offered. What kind of silly game are you playing?

Maybe I'm just "listening paranoid" but it rather seemed that you were willfully misconstruing my use of the term "higher power" so as to include what we both would clearly agree are non supernatural entities such as the Motor Vehicle Department or the local Don.

In any case I will grant you that your counterexample (any government, I suppose) is not a supernatural power.

It is also not what I had in mind by "higher" power. Perhaps I should have said "higher than human" power where human can be taken to be an individual or a collection.

As to (2): In what manner, precisely, am I "a century or two out of date with your anthropology" and what the fuck does that have to do with this discussion?

I believe you made a claim, something to the effect that within the very broad rubric of "Abrahamic" religions, there are those who conceive that God is to man as Harvard professor is to Hottentot (I think you actually wrote "hunter gatherer" ).

In the early days of anthropology, the idea was that societies can be divided into a hierarchy of low middle and high grades of savagery, barbarism and civilization (hence 3x3 = 9 distinct stages).
English gentlemen of course occupied the highest level, whereas hunter gatherers were assigned to the level of "savages" , high, middle or low as the case might be.

I must admit, I can't think offhand of a branch of the Abrahamic religions where that is a normative or widespread idea; but then I remembered that in Mormonism, the idea is that ordinary people can be elevated to god hood upon their demise. and that that is precisely the origin of the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

You seem to be making a variety of assumptions without any basis. Why do you, for instance, think that I believe that "god is just a man with a more literate culture supported by a more advanced technology and intricate social infrastructure." I don't recall saying anything about God being a man or my being a Mormon. In fact, as you have been posting to these forums for about as long as I have you have every reason to know that I am not a Mormon

I didn't say or imply that you personally subscribed to the belief that "god is to man as Harvard professor is to hunter gatherer"; only that you wrote that such was the belief
of some un-named branch of the Abrahamic religions.

I'm not even saying that there is no such group around, only that I don't know who they might be, unless you were possibly referring to the Mormon doctrine I alluded to above.

Reconstructionism is one variety of Judaism, and Judaism is a religion

Yes, agreed, that is so. Reconstruction is one variety of Judaism, and Judaism is a religion. I didn't think there was any controversy on those points, but glad to have that cleared up in any case. You are 100% correct.

If I was clueless before, that defect is now repaired wrt those two points, so let that not be a stumbling block.

However, I am also not a Reconstructionist and never implied in any way that I was a Reconstructionist.

Peace on your head. I never said you were (not that there's anything wrong with that). The Reconstructionists came into the story because we (that's the royal we, here) were ruminating about versions of the Abrahamic religions which could be said to be more or less free of supernatural entanglements, or aspired to be.

So far you have proved that you are very good at constructing and demolishing strawmen

"Attacking a straw man" is the case when someone proceeds to demolish a position not actually held by the opposition, but which one pretends the opposition holds.

So which position do you say I've falsely ascribed to you, to the Abrahamic religions, to religion generally, or in fact to any one or any thing ?

Calls of "Straw man" have been thrown in my direction before, and often it turns out that I've said something like "Members of religion X believe proposition Y" whereupon someone objects "I am a member of religion X and I most emphatically deny, objure and disdain proposition Y, therefore you are attacking a straw man".

If proposition Y is traditionally taught, present in the doctrinal statements of the religions founders, widely believed, or even officially tolerated in the sense that holding position Y doesn't get you frowned at or corrected (and is held by more than a "fringe" element within the religion) , then its not a straw man, even if you personally don't hold with proposition Y.

When I think about religion, I like to go back in time..........way back. The ancient Egyptians believed that there where Gods in the heavens and when you died your heart was weighed on a scale against a feather, if heart was free of sin you could go into a beautiful afterlife, but if your heart was heavy with sin, a horrible monster would eat your soul and you would be dead. The epic poem of Gilgamish tells the tale of a man that is told by God that a terrible flood is coming and he should build an ark and save 7 of each animal. Does the theme of these stories seem familiar? Lets go farther back........where did the ancient peoples get these ideas from? Do we believe what we believe because we have the books from 2000yrs ago or do we believe what we believe because of cultural traditions from the VERY distant past?

ref 24
I don't actually know anything, but here's my guess:

Specific themes such as a pleasant afterlife for the deserving, and none at all or an unpleasant one for the undeserving, or the idea of a universal flood drowning all but a selected set of people and the animals they were instructed to save, have particular historic sources. Since writing only appeared some five or six thousand years ago, there isn't too much hope of tracing the stories back much before then.

The best chance I can think of off hand is that scenes from the known stories might be painted or carved onto artifacts that somehow survive from a time before writing, and that would give us some hint (but not proof positive) that the stories themselves were being told back then.

Broader themes such as pollution or contamination from taboo objects, menstruating women or from corpses, the feeling that certain people, places or things are sacred, belief in spirits, belief in witchcraft and divination, belief that one can command or influence natural events such as rain or bounteous crops by prayers, ceremonies, dances or sacrifices, belief in communication with the spirits of the dead, belief in the power of dreams, and so on are sufficiently widespread (one hesitates to say "universal" because there seems always to be a counterexample somewhere) that they most likely either arise out of the common experience of people as hunter gatherers and later as subsistence farmers, or because a predilection for such beliefs is somehow present in the structure of our brains.

~23

This is getting rather convoluted, but I'll attempt a reply.

As to (1), I am happy that you acknowledge that I don't play games, but do play logical inferences. Hopefully you see the differences outside of a very broad Late Wittgensteinian conception of "game."

"I believe you made a claim, something to the effect that within the very broad rubric of "Abrahamic" religions, there are those who conceive that God is to man as Harvard professor is to Hottentot (I think you actually wrote "hunter gatherer" )."

I think that you need some lessons in reading skills. I never said word one about anyone conceiving G-d to be a man. I did say "Some interpretations of at least one of the Abrahamic religions hold that the higher being is, indeed, higher, in the same sense that a Harvard professor is higher to a hunter gatherer....." What that means in plain English is that G_d is not some "infinitely __________" being but that he is "higher" than a human being by some measurable notion of "higher." It doesn't mean he is human. (Put differently, descriptions of or references to G_d containing superlatives have all sorts of problems with self-contradiction that have been known for three or four centuries now.)

As to the rest of your first and second posts, I repeat that you are simply, once again, dragging out your apparently very superficial and elementary understandings of certain religious sorts (and of English) and trying to create strawmen to refute. I think that is exactly what you're doing when you contend that my views are necessarily a reflection of Mormonism or Reconstructionism. You are constructing straw men, rather than simply analyzing and responding to what I have said. (Further, I have some significant doubts about your deep understanding of either Mormonism or Reconstruction, but that is a somewhat different topic.)

~24

I guess I don't quite get your point. Could you be more specific about what you're trying to say and demonstrate?

Since there seems to be so much boxing/classification among certain individuals in this thread, let me give an example of why I'm not much impressed by what you may well have in mind:

Knowing how and for what purposes history and "mythology" was written in ancient societies it seems perfectly reasonable to me that "myths" in various cultures would have a similar theme if they arose from common and well known facts. For instance, there are many middle eastern flood stories because, apparently, there was in fact a quite dramatic flood in that region in ancient times.

It therefore does not seem to follow that if societies A, B and C have similar "myths" that they copied those myths from each other - such "myths" might well arise from oral traditions in each of those societies that, in turn, are based on common historical facts transmitted orally in each of those societies. Hence, noting similarities between "myths" doesn't, per se, suggest a particular explanation for those similarities. One should keep in mind that there is no such thing as a "logic of induction" and that our intuitions are no more than primitive hypotheses - hypotheses that are, in certain instances, very difficult to definitively test.

ref 26

Oh is THAT what you meant, simply that instead of saying god is "infinitely" possessed of this or that attribute, one claims (I think Rambam is among that number) merely that god is possessed of the quality to a huge degree ?

You might have just said that and saved us a bit of run around.

And yes, I "get" that reducing an infinity to merely a huge finite number removes all sorts of confusions and conundrums associated with infinite quantities.

Now, since I am admittedly a bear of very small brain, how does that bear (no pun) on the question of supernaturalism ?

...you are simply, once again, dragging out your apparently very superficial and elementary understandings of certain religious sorts and of English. ....

Fine. I'm a dummy. My understanding of "religious sorts and of English is superficial". That's what you're trying to get me to improve, no?

So tell me in English as she is spoke, so I can understand; what is it I say that you or the Abrahamic religions, or religions in general believe that they actually don't?

I think that's a pretty straight and fair question. Dont you?

~28

I also have never said or implied "huge." Do you do this all the time? It is not a very effective communication technique.

What I said was that the difference was analogous to the difference between the "powers" of a hunter gatherer and a contemporary Harvard Professor.

"So tell me in English as she is spoke, so I can understand; what is it I say that you or the Abrahamic religions, or religions in general believe that they actually don't?"

As I understand your thesis it is that to be a "legitimate religion" one must believe in the "supernatural." Now I am sure that if you look at each and every expression of every variant of each of the Abrahamic religions that you can come to that conclusion.

However, it is not true that every variant of each of those religions comes to that conclusion. You have already mentioned Mormonism and Reconstruction as variants or Christianity and Judaism which are not at their core "supernatural." I would also argue that primitive Judaism, before the formation of the Torah and the inclusion of the first chapter of Genesis, was largely based on non "supernatural" propositions (e.g., there was one god who was not a man but was some other sort of being, who was materially more mighty than the other gods, and who could do things that were impossible for men of that day (but which may very well not be impossible for men today)). The last trait is well known today as "Clarke's Third Law," e.g., "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Presumably you would agree that teaching and law giving are also not supernatural activities?

#22: G-d may have chosen, but the object of his choice retains free will and must implement the choice.

Yes, yes. God has chosen you and now you have to live up to it. And if that's too close for comfort, the Jeebus died for your sins and now you have to devote your life to his example. Plenty of religions place a "cost" on consolation in order to prevent it from seeming cheap and easy. How else would a religion pass muster when most people know that you can't get something for nothing?

>30 Lunar: Lunar, you make a good point that things don't come "cheap and easy" and "you can't get something for nothing". Very little that is worthwhile comes without some hard work, application, difficulty, discipline, devotion of time and energy, etc. But since religion reflects human experience, surely it is no surprise that religion also recognises this?

~30

So, I guess you'd agree that religion is all about the supernatural and consolation? Couldn't be about anything else - particularly if you define it that way. (Isn't it interesting how some of the most adamant theists - at least the most adamant theists of "certain faiths" - always end up agreeing with some of the most adamant atheists - at least the most adamant atheists formerly of "certain faiths"? it is almost as if they share most of their premises.)

ref 29
As I understand your thesis it is that to be a "legitimate religion" one must believe in the "supernatural."

Close, I suppose, but not exactly.

A minor point, but just to be clear: I don't think I ever used a term such as "legitimate" as a modifier of "religion" as in "X is a legitimate religion, but Y is not". I suppose I might use the term to describe the accuracy or propriety of attaching the label "religion" to one organization or school of thought or another, as in "Its 'legitimate' to call Christianity a religion but not to call Nationalism a religion. "

Its not so much that I've decided a priori that supernaturalism is a necessary attribute of religion, but it seems a matter of observation that supernaturalism is a big part of the "major" religions.

We know that defining "religion" is a tricky business so my strategy to cut through the gordian knot is simply to talk about
Judaism, CHristianity, and Islam (The "Abrahamics"), along with
,to a lesser externt, the Hindu Buddhist cluster (or at least that part of Buddhist tradition which most informed people would agree is "religion" )

The assumption of course is that Judaism is a religion, Christianity is a religion, Islam is a religion, Hinduism is a religion and (much of, though possibly not all of) Buddhism is a religion.

Now of course all of the above are long and well developed traditions with plenty of sub traditions and contrasting threads woven into their diverse tapestries. Some of those threads, even in Islam, are or have been "rationalizing" trends which seek reason and a certain distance from the mystical or supernatural, but on the whole, all of the above are deeply commited to supernaturalism with the possible exception of small minorites of each which attempt to maintain some or all of the traditional doctrines and practices of their respective lineages with no or with reduced reliance on the supernatural.

It may be, for example, that the Reconstructionists have no element of the supernatural left. I'm not sure that they make that claim for themselves, but even if they did and even if they were correct, Reconstructionism is such a tiny part of Judaism that we can leave them out without missing much in the grand scheme.

The overwhelming position among the religions I've named depends on the supernatural.

By "overwhelming position" I mean that it is the tradition of long provenance, the default teaching, the official position where there is anything like an officialdom, and the most usual position of the actual members of the congregation.

If one insists that:
1) Each and every thread of tradition, and
2) Each and every individual variant of that tradition must embrace the supernatural to say that the religion as a whole embraces supernaturalism, and
3) The existence of non supernaturalists in the pews shows that the religion is not supernatural
Then I'ld say that's while that's a possible opinion it is impossibly restrictive.

By that account no sufficiently diverse religion will turn out to be "supernatural" because there will always, in the modern world at least, be a dissenter or nay sayer who wants to preserve what he (or she) considers the best of the tradition but without the supernatural baggage.

So we're back to the enumeration of the 3 Abrahamics and the two wings of the Hindu-Buddhist cluster.

Do you claim that any of those are essentially non supernatural?

It is normative in modern Judaism to believe in the world to come , though it was not always thus, and in revelation both written and oral. That's not supernatural?

Belief in life after death is normative in Christianity and Islam. Am I mistaken about that? Belief in revelation, of the scriptures in the Christian world, the Koran in the Islamic one. Is that not supernatural?

I'll leave it to the reader to identify the supernatural elements of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Now belief in revelation and belief in an afterlife are not the only supernatural elements of the Abrahamics and Hindu Buddhist religions but they are examples of supernatural beliefs which are pretty darned important to those religions.

If I'm mistaken, it could only be that:
1) I'm mistaken about the beliefs being examples of supernaturalism
2) I'm mistaken about the importance of those beliefs in the religions cited.

Over to you.

~33

I think we're getting closer, but I must tell you that I think that your argument pattern is a bit circular. Let's see why I think that:

" I suppose I might use the term to describe the accuracy or propriety of attaching the label "religion" to one organization or school of thought or another, as in "Its 'legitimate' to call Christianity a religion but not to call Nationalism a religion.""

Yes, that is the sense in which I meant "legitimate religion." But look what you're doing already, you have set up the DEFINITION such that in order for a belief system to be a religion it must involve the "supernatural." Now if that is merely the way you want to define things, then we don't have an argument, but neither do you have a point about how the world works, only a point about how you use your technical variant of English.

"Its not so much that I've decided a priori that supernaturalism is a necessary attribute of religion, but it seems a matter of observation that supernaturalism is a big part of the "major" religions....."

O.K., great, so let's see how you then proceed to apply that purportedly empirical distinction.....

"We know that defining "religion" is a tricky business so my strategy to cut through the gordian knot is simply to talk about Judaism, CHristianity, and Islam (The "Abrahamics")....

"It may be, for example, that the Reconstructionists have no element of the supernatural left. I'm not sure that they make that claim for themselves, but even if they did and even if they were correct, Reconstructionism is such a tiny part of Judaism that we can leave them out without missing much in the grand scheme.

The overwhelming position among the religions I've named depends on the supernatural."

Leaving aside for the moment that we still don't seem to have a very good definition of "the supernatural," the way this apparently works is that we're back again in the circle. Judaism, Christianity and Islam require a belief in the supernatural, and if any of their variants or other belief systems that are generally referred to as "religions" do not, well then, those variants are "such a tiny part" of the whole that they can be left out of consideration.

Now if that sort of "reasoning" is satisfying to you, then I suppose that is the end of the discussion, but if it isn't then maybe you need to take Hillel's advice and "go and study the commentary."

I hope you will not take offense, but to me the above argument pattern sounds an awful lot like the following dialog:

"Ni**ers are inferior."

"Well, Adam is a ni**r, and even you will admit that he is a genius - much smarter than you or I."

"No, it is a general rule. Ni**ers are generally inferior - there are always those really infrequent outliners that we can ignore."

We know the "general name" for that argument pattern, don't we?

#32: So, I guess you'd agree that religion is all about the supernatural and consolation?

No, like I said in my first post above, the supernatural is just a means towards an end. It should be possible for religions to make claims without necessarily resorting to supernatural explanations. It's just that invoking the supernatural is a more convenient tool when those claims are baseless. Watch out for those bad thetans!

34

You seem to object to excluding outliers when calculating aggregate measures.

That's a standard tactic in dealing with real world data.

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080402093513AASTohU

aka

http://yhoo.it/NSJvmw

If you don't want to exclude outliers, we can keep them in. Outliers tend to skew the calculation of averages, but less so for medians.

More later.

ref 34 continued

We don't have a general definition of "religion" but we can have a working substitute:
1. These are religions:
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, some of Buddhism.
2. These are not religions:
Nationalism, Libertarianism, Socialism, Communism, Liberalism, Vegetarianism, Nudism, Skepticism, Epicureanism, Logical positivism, Idealism, Conservatism, Materialism.

I'll entertain any reasonable attempt at a definition which includes the first list and excludes the second list, but even in the absence of a general theory, that's enough to carry on.

We don't have a general definition of "supernatural", so how about trying the same tactic?
1. These are supernatural:
Disembodied spirits, the afterlife, reincarnation, astral traveling, revelation, prophecy, divine intervention in human history, special creation, shape shifting, the indian rope trick,
materializing objects (macroscopic objects, I mean) out of "thin
air", telekineses, transforming lead to gold, water to wine or turning people into toads.
2. These are not supernatural:
Rain, wind, the motion of celestial bodies, climate generally, crop yields, volcano eruptions, gravity, electromagnetism,
living organisms and their ability to grow, self repair and reproduce.

As with religion, I'll entertain any reasonable general definition that includes the first list and excludes the second.

If it becomes important to classify something not mentioned on the "is religion" or "is not religion" list, or not in the "is supernatural" or "is not supernatural" lists, we can handle them one at a time on an ad hoc basis.


I'm guessing you might have some objections to the entries on those lists, but that's ok. We might come to a better understanding of what we think we're talking about by taking up specific cases.

~36

So you think that matters of definition are statistical. Interesting. I always thought that they were logical. "All swans are white" means, in your world, that 99% of swans are white? O.K., if you say so.

~37

I think that Plato/Socrates refuted this nominalist or enumerative way of constructing definitions around the 5th Century B.C. As I recall, the dialog was "Meno," but I could be wrong about that.......In any case, the problem with defining something by providing lists of examples is that if you already know the characteristic(s)that allow you to include and exclude items from your lists then you might as well just talk about that/those characteristic(s).

Perhaps we should proceed in a manner that has not been so universally rejected? You might start by looking up "epistemology" and doing some reading.

ref 39

Everything old is new again!

It very often happens that we can put things into categories, but we can't articulate precisely how we derive or define those categories, that is, how we sort the individual cases into their corresponding categories.

One such example is that of character recognition, telling a printed or hand written "A" from a "B" from a "C" and so on.

You can show a human (a learner) a number of examples and can give some rules of thumb such as "A 'c' is more than half a circle (but not a full circle) with an opening on the right" and so on.

Now try to make those rules precise enough to build into a machine that can do character recognition. Oops! We don't have the rules. The conditions of the Meno (if it was the Meno) are not fully met and so the Meno dialog's demonstration, valid as it is, simply doesn't apply.

There are other problems, some of them of great economic consequence which fall into the same category. How does a master metal-worker in the steel plant "know" when the mixture is ready to pour? Years of clinical experience, to be sure, but what, precisely does he do and how exactly does he know when the time has come?
It turns out that there are only a small number of crucial variables (the heat, as judged by the color plus a few other that I forget. Its been a few decades since I've dealt with that)
How to make a machine that automates the process when the master can't give you a precise recipe?

As with the optical character recognition problem, one way to get an answer is to have a large number of examples, the "training set", along with the classification produced by an expert in the field by methods even he (or she) the expert can't articulate. All he (or she) can say is "thats it!" or "Nah! Not yet".

But there are mathematical techniques which can "cluster" the "Yes" from the "No" examples (or the"A" from the "B" from the "C" etc) on the bases of "features" that we can measure and the known classifications provided by the experts.

The idea may be shocking or unsettling, but we really have discovered a thing or two since classical antiquity and among those things are advances in the field that is now called "Machine Learning".

A little quality time with your search engine and the terms
"Machine learning", regression, cluster analysis, neural nets, and the like should convince even a skeptic that I'm not just "winging" it here.

Knowledge of what has gone before is an important part of the total package, but one's knowledge is not complete without bringing it up to date and into the twenty first century.

The method you may have thought was invalidated centuries ago is actually producing commercially viable results even as we speak.

In "real life" much of what we do (or what our brains do) is not accessible to our introspection, and that is why the Meno dialog's demonstration, clever as it is, fails in the real world.

#40

Machine learning can work in one of two ways. In the first, a training set is created by human beings. The humans go through a lot of examples of the things to be sorted and manually label them as "A", "B", "C" etc. The humans also generate a list of features, e.g. generically "points","holes", "ends". The machine then takes the list of features and the list of example categories and creates a model or map of the relationship between features and categories. This model has parameters which are also set by the human depending on the required classification error (do you want to be sure to put all A's in the A bin or do you want to be sure never to put something that is not an A in the A bin or something in between). No machine classifier is ever perfect; from the human perspective machines always make mistakes.

The important point here is that you can only build a machine classifier if you already know how to classify things.

The second way a machine classifier can work is to just throw it a set of features and let it group things as it will. It produces sets of things it thinks are similar based on the features you give it. Again, a human is required to make sense of the classification sets, to verify that it did put all the A's in one bin and did not put the A's in a separate bin to the a's.

Machine classifiers can help humans classify things if the humans already know that the things can indeed be unambiguously classified. And then they are never perfect. Without a human designer in the loop, they are useless.

Some interesting thoughts from a recent blog post by medievalist / English prof Eileen Joy about a class she's teaching this semester on the supernatural:

As I began preparing this syllabus, I realized that the supernatural -- as a category related to material/immaterial experience, as literary genre, and as an operative figure/realm/atmosphere within literature (furthermore, as both noun and adjective) -- was an incredibly slippery thing to define...

Is the supernatural a monstrous or an all-too-human genre, or something in between? You see, thinking about the supernatural is a tricky business. Is it ghost stories? Magic? Angels and demons? Fairy tales? Marvels and wonders? Tales of supra-psychic abilities? Any seemingly material phenomena that cannot be explained with recourse to what is "natural" or "scientific"? Is it a matter of belief, of superstition, of religion, of the paranormal, of dreams, Otherworlds (heaven, hell, faerylands, etc.), other space-time dimensions (wormholes), or something else? How is the supernatural to be distinguished from the fantastic (or, are they same?), and as a genre, from science fiction, from horror, from fantasy, and so on? Clearly, an interest in the supernatural is an enduring fascination over time, from Ovid's Metamorphoses to The Exorcist and television's Lost and Supernatural series and everything in between: we never seem to tire of the very types of stories that our scientific rationality (in the past and the present) tells us is either highly unlikely or could never possibly be true. In this sense, the supernatural turns out to be a felicitously fertile area for investigating questions of the ontological structures of realism and unrealism, in historical thinking as well as in literature.

At the beginning of the post, Joy shares a quote from Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre:

In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know . . . . there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination -- and the laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality -- but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.

I thought that what we mean by words like 'supernatural', including 'miracles' and even 'religion' have changed radically over time and that you cannot understand where we have ended up without understanding how we got here. As I understand it, all three terms were brought into their modern meaning by theologians directly and then scientists indirectly whose discipline grew out of the need of theologians to differentiate what is natural, and belongs to the realm of earth and man, and what is beyond nature and belongs to the realm of God, specifically to correctly classify miracles. Isn't it also a uniquely Western preoccupation. Browsing around a bit I came across this interesting article which summarizes the history quite well.

http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=hs...

~42 and 43

Interesting, but you aren't playing the game of "group them and dismiss them" that was modalursine's underlying point. That is so much more satisfying to a person of faith. No complexity, no counterexamples, no definitions, just good old prejudice.

Reminds me of that thread about the meaning of "God" http://www.librarything.com/topic/102330 where everyone knew what side they were on, but no one was all that good explaining their side.

Isn't that the way the "battle for flag" thing works as well?

~40

Dang, you'd better find one of them philosopher fellows and tell him that the techs and the neuroscientists have solved the problem of meaning. And you'd probably first tell them that you discovered that the problem of meaning is a problem in psychology and character recognition not in philosophy. They'll be really excited to know that they can close that book and put it on the shelf. It has been such a bother for so long.......

But about the meanings of "religion" and "supernatural" ..........even as problems of psychology and character recognition.........

ref 45
Hmmmm.., I'm I reading you properly? (Probably not) But it seems you're not making a distinction between what a thing "is" in the sense of how we tell its an X and not a Y, and what that thing "means".

How to classify things when the details of class membership are not open to our introspection isn't exactly a "solved" problem in the sense of having a more or less mechanical method that works every time, buts its not beyond hope either. Machine classification, of which regression analysis is one approach among many, can sometimes get us practical answers.

As to what things "mean", that's a whole difrferent kettle of fish, isn't it?

"As to what things "mean", that's a whole difrferent kettle of fish, isn't it?"


I don't know, is it? Ever read any philosophy? The "problem of meaning" is a fairly well known phrase in philosophy. It is one of a handful of topics in epistemology. It refers to the fact that when we use words to make distinctions, we can't always exactly say where the boundaries are of our words. One way of conceptualizing the "meaning" of a word is that it refers to a particular class of things, but then we get to the further problem of what things and what distinguishes those things from nonmembers of that class.

For instance, we were talking about the words "supernatural" and religion" You pointed to some things that you thought were "supernatural" and some other things you thought were "religions." I pointed out to you that this had been found to be, some 2500 years ago, a defective way of drawing the boundaries around what "supernatural" and "religion" mean - all at once you engaged in this discussion about character recognition by software.

I'm sorry, but I don't see the relevance, probably because I don't know more than some very elementary things about programming and the problems faced by programmers. And I suspect you don't see the relevance of what I've been saying because you don't know more than some very elementary things about philosophy and theology.

Perhaps it would be better if we stopped talking and learned some more about those respective topics? OTOH, if we want to continue to talk, that is fine too.

Just as an idle exercise, I have just built a machine classifier that, given an input word, phrase or sentence, will correctly classify any input that any reasonable person would classify a supernatural, as "supernatural".

ref 47

Well, lets see.

Suppose we ask "is the supernatural a necessary part of religion?"

Clearly, we'll need to agree on what we mean by "religion" and by "supernatural".

Now we both agree that "when we use words to make distinctions, we can't always exactly say where the boundaries are of our words"

So I propose a "cheat".
What is religion? Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Christianity and (at least Mahayana, perhaps other types as well) Buddhism.

With a small finite set, we cover the vast majority of all the religious people alive on the planet today.

Ah, you object, that method of dealing with categories has been proved inadequate 2500 years ago.

But proofs start from assumptions, and if the assumptions underlying a proof are not met, the proof does not apply.

So what are the assumption of the proof you refer to?

According to your description as I understood it (plenty of room for error here, so let me not be too cock sure about it) they are:
1. That we know the criteria and can apply them directly rather than enumerating each instance
AND
2. We are dealing with a set of potentially unlimited size so a general definition (such as: A circle is the locus of all points on a plane equidistant from a fixed point, the center) rather than saying "This is a circle, that is a circle, ...., there's yet another circle, and so on"

But we don't "know" the criteria, or at least not totally consciously, and we don't need to deal with a set of unlimited size. A small finite set will do well enough for our purposes.

We can classify a finite set by enumeration. I hope there's no controversy about that?

Change the question. Narrow it. Don't ask "Is supernaturalism a necessary part of (all ) religion (everywhere and everywhen) but "Is supernaturalism a necessary part of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and the chosen bits of Buddhism ? "

If we can agree that The Abrahamics and the Hindu-Buddhist cluster are "religions" we can carry on.

If not, I suppose we can talk about that and find a large enough subset of all of the above that we CAN agree are "religions" for the purpose of discussion.

Here's an analogy.
We ask a mathematician if we can find a procedure that ends in a finite number of steps to tell whether we have a palindrome or not. He says "Of course not. A palindrome can be of any length,
so you would need any number of steps (or an infinite memory) to be able to detect every possible palindrome. "

But we don't need to deal with infinite palindromes. We can specify some maximum length, say as many letters as there are stars in the sky or (bigger still) neutrons in the universe, or more practically, a few million letters long. Bingo. We've reduced the problem to a finite size and now we can (in theory at least) solve the problem.

If some sophomore math student wants to object "But sir! We've proved that you can't construct a method to find all palindromes" what do we say? We say "Quite right. We're not finding ALL palindromes, we're only finding palindromes that belong to a finite set of them, those that are a million letters long or less, and there's no proof that forbids that"

"The nail that stands up is the one that gets banged down" (Japanese proverb)

So at the risk of getting banged down, let me stand up and say:

1. Revelation is an important part of the Abrahamic religions. If we were to remove revelation from the mix, its hard to imagine what would be left of them.

2. Revelation as understood in the Abrahamic religions is an example of "The supernatural"

Now I must admit, that before hanging around the "Religion" formums I would have thought those two propositions totally bland, unexceptionable and almost "self evidently" true.

Live and learn.

The counterarguments, if any, could be very interesting.

Do people want to argue that the Abrahamics don't really "need" revelation or that "revelation" is not supernatural (but if not, what is? Maybe there's no such thing? ) , or all of the above?

I just put the words "supernatural" and "religion" into an English to Irish online dictionary and got back the words "supernatural" and "religion". Now I don't speak much Irish, but that's not a bad test to find out if the concepts "supernatural" and "religion" are a modern invention. It's not fool proof by any means, but it might suggest that the Irish, well known for preserving Christianity in the Dark Ages, did not associate their Abrahamic faith with the supernatural until the heathen English taught them the word.

WTF?

>50 modalursine:

Verbal plenary inspiration seems to me clearly supernatural. But an understanding of revelation rooted in the dialectical nature of history, a dialectical nature which for me mirrors the dialectical and perichoretic nature of the Triune God? I'm not sure that can be called supernatural. Would Marx have called the historical dialect "supernatural"?

"but if not, what is? Maybe there's no such thing?"

"Supernatural" is, to me, a name given to a certain type of category error that people make.

"Supernatural" is, to me, a name given to a certain type of category error that people make.

Agreed.

"Supernatural" is an illusory divisive concept invented by Western imperialist materialist atheists during the so called "enlightenment". Cultures in other places, and at other times, are clearly not deceived. They see the world as it really is without needless and false categories.

>53 cjbanning: and 54

So in what category would you put the Japanese shinigami or the Chinese Yuān Guǐ? I would call these non-western beings supernatural (leaving aside for the moment whether they can be proven to exist).

I would accept that the term supernatural may be incorrect, and that this sort of being is actually a natural (i.e. material, eventually observable) being, but I do think there is a clear category of being which, at present, exist only in individual experience and which cannot at present be demonstrated to exist from a scientific perspective.

Is there a term other than supernatural that you would prefer?

>55 Helcura:

I'm not quite sure what you're asking. I don't think anybody involved in this conversation is denying that some manifestations of religion involve a belief in the supernatural. Indeed, I think pretty much everyone here would agree that most religion has historically included this characteristic; the debate is over whether that makes belief supernatural essential to religion. So I wouldn't be surprised to find beliefs in death gods included in that type of category error which is supernaturalism. They seem to fall into the category of "immaterial forces effecting material changes," which is how I understand the supernatural. (Although I should perhaps make clear that I consider things like gravity and the weak nuclear force to be "material forces" since they exist within the material realm.)

If you're asking if non-supernaturalist versions of those beliefs in death gods can be formed, then the answer is probably yes--either by demonstrating evidence they exist and then creating models to explain the evidence (in which case they are natural), or else by making the claim completely non-falsifiable and thus eliminating the need for evidence altogether (in which case they would be transcendental).

>56 cjbanning:

I think I'm more asking what rrp means by:

"Supernatural" is an illusory divisive concept invented by Western imperialist materialist atheists during the so called "enlightenment". Cultures in other places, and at other times, are clearly not deceived. They see the world as it really is without needless and false categories.

This seems to be saying that "supernatural" is a false and needless category.

He's arguing that it wasn't until the brutish, nasty enlightenment philosophers came along that anyone needed to divide god, witches, magick, and elves from the purely rational/natural.

Ahhhh.

At least, that's my read on it.

Unfortunately, the term preceded the enlightenment by a couple of hundred years.

Jesse is right. The etymology of words is fascinating. The word did indeed precede the enlightenment by a couple of hundred years, but did not mean then what it means today.

Mediaeval Catholic theologians and philosophers invented the concept of the "supernatural order" (and by doing so, accidentally invented science) in order to tighten up the category of things that should be classified as miracles. They wouldn't have even considered the faintest possibility of putting "witches, magick, and elves" in the same category and neither would or do most Christians of that day or this.

The game that is being played is that the atheists would like to put "witches, magick, and elves" in the same supernatural category as the divine, and in this they have been aided by a drift in the common meaning of the word which was driven to some extent by those nasty, brutish and short philosophers of the so-called enlightenment. A mediaeval Christian would not understand the question "Can there be religion without the supernatural?" because the concepts of "religion" and "supernatural" had yet to be invented. Those Irish Christians didn't have a word for "supernatural" because they didn't need it. In their world there was no "supernatural".

ref 61
Linguistic categories can be tricky things. Many years ago, my friend Tom the Chinese scholar explained to me that when counting in Chinese, you need to have the proper "marker" word which is a different word for each category such as "long narrow things", "flat things" and so on. In English-Chinese pidgeons, the word "piece" substitutes for the Chinese marker word, hence the "one piece shirt, two piece shirt, three peice shirt" that you'll sometimes hear from native Chinese speakers whose English isnt all that wonderful.

Jean Francois , the psychiatrist turned anthropologist brought home an "igi soru" board, which is a carved board for playing a Ruandese board game. The "igi" part comes from the local language's marker for flat things, and since the board is (sort of ) flat it takes "igi".

So I "get" that ideas about which things belong together, and are considered "sort of the same" can vary by language and culture, which of course also vary over time.

Now tell me what's wrong with putting witches, angels, spirits, demons, and gods into a category of
"imaginary beings" or "Beings that exist only in literature"?

If you say that the category wasn't available in days of yore or that the denizens of an earlier age would disagree with the categorization or even fail to understand what it is that unites the items,
I'ld say that that's an interesting linguistic historical or cultural note, but so what?

Today, we make a distinction between fish and mammals, and we say a whale is a mammal not a fish.
Clearly it was not always thus, but again, so what?

Of course, if you say that angels, spirits and demons etc do exist outside of literature, that's a different soft of conversation.

Hmmm.

62: Now tell me what's wrong with putting witches, angels, spirits, demons, and gods into a category of
"imaginary beings" or "Beings that exist only in literature"?

Not much, necessary, except few people seem to be actually discussing witches or demons or polytheistic gods (most of whom I would easily cast as supernatural beings--if I didn't view them instead as simply imaginary natural beings!). Angels and possibly spirits is at least closer to what theists here on LibraryThing do believe, although I don't remember anyone--with the exception of fuzzi?--professing a specific belief in angels, and I don't really know what you mean by "spirits." Ghosts? Souls who have moved onto an afterlife? Living persons understood as nephash? Something else?

In any case, the monotheistic God who is Ground of Being and Unmoved Mover certainly seems to be in a different type of category from all of these.

#62 So what?

You seem confident that you can cleave reality at the correct joints. I am not confident in your ability at all, because I know there are no "correct" joints. Every joint is the artifact of one group of humans, an invention, an illusion.

We will allow that a whale is now in the category mammal, not fish. That is not very contentious. Not much rides on it, unless of course, you have an appetite for whale meat. Every day, I hazard to guess, someone somewhere re-categorizes some living thing or other, and someone else disagrees. Not a surprise, because the categories are all artifacts, and not very important.

We have a little more freedom categorizing "imaginary beings"; everyone can have a go. Many disagree that we should cleave where you cleave. Cleave away I say, it matters little; we will each continue to cleave our own way. Agreement is only required in order to act collectively or to have a meaningful conversation. Thank God we don't need to do the first here. Some hope, and a lot more empathy, is needed if you ever want to succeed at the second.

In any case, the monotheistic God who is Ground of Being and Unmoved Mover certainly seems to be in a different type of category from all of these.

Except such a concept isn't any different from any of those things. The only difference is the social acceptability of professing belief in one over the other.

>66 StormRaven:

The difference is, there's a level of abstraction to the God of philosophy which stands in a fairly strong contrast to the concreteness of witches or polytheistic gods. Witches and polytheistic gods are basically creatures like ourselves, but with superpowers. It's far from clear that is the case with the Ground of Being.

> 67

Yeah, I'd say there's a level of empirical possibility (even if wed to significant unlikelihood) involved with unicorns and djinn, while the "abstraction" of the "Ground of Being" is thoroughly unobservable and useless.

The difference is, there's a level of abstraction to the God of philosophy which stands in a fairly strong contrast to the concreteness of witches or polytheistic gods.

No, there isn't. You just fool yourself into thinking there is. They are all just as imaginary as all the others.

reg 67

Witches and polytheistic gods are basically creatures like ourselves, but with superpowers. It's far from clear that is the case with the Ground of Being.

I could certainly be mistaken about this, but it sure does seem that for the overwhelming proportion of ordinary believers (i.e. those that are not specifically trained as specialists or functioning as professionals) , at least from the Abrahamic side of the house, the deity is pretty much like us, but with superpowers. Man is "made in the image" of god, which, since god is incorporeal, could only mean that our minds are like gods only less so. "What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you visit him? For lo! Man is but a little lower than the angels...." I think perhaps some Islamic scholars put angels lower because they don't have free will, but maybe I've got that all muddled.

But never mind, for the moment what "most believers" believe.

Why should we buy in to the notion of a "Ground of Being"? Since when does being need a ground?

And if it does need a ground, what is the deity's ground of being? If you should answer that the deity doesn't *need* a ground of being, then I ask again; if a deity doesn't need a ground of being, why would anything else? If there can be something (the deity) without a ground of being, why not the universe as a whole?

Even if there were such a thing as a "ground of being" why would it necessarily be a personality with intelligence and agency, rather than some kind of impersonal something or other like space and time?

PS. I don't think there can be any such thing as a "necessarily existing" being either. That's flat out nonsense. There can be things that can't exist logically (square circles and married bachelors), but something that must exist by its nature? I'm sure I can find a respectable philosopher (and not just one) who would pronounce that so much flapdoodle.

>70 modalursine:: I feel like we're on a merry-go-round from the "Why is there something rather than nothing?" thread.

We can turn the question around: why shouldn't we buy into the notion of a "Ground of Being"?

Why shouldn't we ask the question, "Why is there being?" Your argument seems to boil down to this: I don't think there's any use in pondering that "why" question, and I don't see any way for the natural sciences to get at it (because that's not the type of question the natural sciences ask).

Well fine. You don't see any reason to ask those questions. But I do. I do, and so do a heck of lot of other people. What reason do you have to tell us not to ask those questions? Just because you don't like it?

I don't like ear-rings. They are pointless pieces of jewelry that involve self-mutilation. There's no reason to wear them. Therefore, nobody should wear ear-rings.

We can turn the question around: why shouldn't we buy into the notion of a "Ground of Being"?

Why shouldn't we buy into the notion of lumineferous aether?

>72 StormRaven:: Ah, but the lumineferous aether was a suggested answer for the question "how" about light. It was about the properties of the material world: properties that science can and does study. Science has studied (and continues to study) light and determined that the lumineferous aether was not an adequate explanation for the behavior of light.

But that's a how question, not a why question. That does not address the question, "Why are we here?"

ref 71
We can turn the question around: why shouldn't we buy into the notion of a "Ground of Being"?

Because its completely unnecessary and unmotivated, probably invented by people with too much time on their hands, perhaps motivated by the need to give a deity something to do when all his other jobs have been outsourced to natural material phenomena.

The "Ground of being" idea doesn't so much answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing as it begs the question by positing that reality needs some sort of "juice" from outside to keep it going, the way electric bulbs need electricity to keep the lights on, and that the source of said "juice" is , who else, HIM.

The good Reverend Dodgson (are deacons properly called "Reverend" ? So much to know! ) sums it up neatly in his figure of the Red King, who mustn't be woken up lest we all go "poof", as we are but the stuff of his dreams.

There are some people (credentialed "philosophers" I mean, who at least have done their homework)
who maintain that the question "Why is there something rather than nothing" is a "non question" in the sense of either being ill formed or nonsensical or somehow not fair dinkum. I must admit, I can't fully follow their arguments. They may turn out to be correct; I suppose I have to keep that possibility open, but for the time being I'm not myself ready to call "MU!" to the question myself.

(I hope I'm not being to obscure with the "MU" thing. Its a Zen term, which, as I misunderstand it, "unasks" the question. Its the equivalent of calling BS to the question itself. )

Those who do think its a legitimate question are divided as to whether the answer is beyond human ken or not.

For myself, I tend to think the question is legit (though as I say, if someone were to prove otherwise in a way I can understand, I wouldn't drop dead of surprise) and I don't think that its necessarily beyond human ken, but I also don't see anybody coming up with a plausible answer or further clarification real soon. I recently read of someone who claimed that we're at least five Einsteins away from solving that one.

There's a related question, that of the "Principle of Sufficient Reason" which was first formulated by
Liebnitz, if I have the story right, which claims in effect that every truth has a reason why it is so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_sufficient_reason

I've heard an objection that the Principle of sufficient reason might be true for any particular thing, but its not necessarily so for the collection of all things that are taken together. I'm not sure I buy that, but at least its not impossible on its face.

>74 modalursine:: "Because its completely unnecessary and unmotivated"

People far smarter than I am have spent their entire lives dedicated to the proposition that it is not only not unnecessary and unmotivated but supremely vital and key to human existence. I, at least, find it puzzling that only recently have people claimed that the concept of the divine is "unnecessary and unmotivated" -- heck, even your hero Lucretius believed the gods existed, even if they didn't care a whip about us contingent beings. And of course, there was one thing for him that wasn't contingent: the swerve, which holds the place, as it were, of the ground of being in his ontology.

But then, maybe that's just my humility kicking in. I have a hard time believing that people I know were better at this than I am (both far smarter and far holier, in the sense that they were better at "being human" than I am) didn't see what you seem to believe is obvious -- to me, that means that it's not obvious, and if you think it is, it's because you've missed something.

And maybe that's the most I have to offer, if I'm being absolutely honest. Maybe the most I have to offer as to why I believe in God is that the alternative doesn't seem obvious to me. The world and my experience within it makes more sense to me if there is God.

(But then, to balance things out, our bible study group last week concluded that a key reason why Jesus kept telling people not to talk about his miracles {not that it stopped him} was that the importance of the miracles was in their not obvious meaning. So maybe obviousness is overrated...)

Ah, but the lumineferous aether was a suggested answer for the question "how" about light.

And it was just as logically based as the concept of "ground of all being". Not only that, the same kind of logic was used to posit lumineferous aether as is used to support the existence of the "ground of all being".

You claim that the "ground of all being" is a why question, but it is a why question only if it is first a "how" question, and on that score it fails for the same reason that lumineferous aether failed.

...the swerve, which holds the place, as it were, of the ground of being in his ontology.

The swerve has nothing to do with "ground of being", its was put there so that the system would not be completely deterministic and therefore would seem to open up a place for "free will".

Lucretius' system, which if course was Epicurus' before him, was a step in the right direction in the sense of attempting to find natural explanations for the world around us instead of invoking mystical, magical or supernatural ones; but no cigar. His (Epicurus') attitude was admirable but his system is purely speculative, not really based on observation, not testable or subjected to empirical tests, pretty much ad hoc and imaginative as to explanations offered for specific phenomenon, and altogether what our more impudent age deems "BS".

People far smarter than I am and smarter even than my smarter older brother Mycroft have believed things that turned out to be wrong after all.

I was reminded of this "Ground of Being" in reading The Essence of Christianity today, encountering this passage:

God as God -- the infinite, universal, non-anthropomorphic being of the understanding, has no more significance for religion than a fundamental general principle has for special science; it is merely the ultimate point of support -- as it were, the mathematical point of religion. The consciousness of human limitation or nothingness which is united with the idea of this being, is by no means a religious consciousness; on the contrary, it characterizes skeptics, materialists, and pantheists.

I concur, whether with respect to the religion in which I participate or the religion I abjure.

>78 paradoxosalpha:

What is "a religious consciousness" if the "consciousness of human limitation or nothingness which is united with the idea of this being" is not one?

If pantheists are not religionists, then what are they? By definition they clearly are not atheists. And what about panentheists? Which camp do they fall into?

Looking at the workpage, however, there seems to be something interesting going on in Feuerbach's thesis beyond what is suggested by that quote alone. It sounds like it might be worth reading, especially since some translations are in the public domain. At the same time, I suspect it may be important to locate Feuerbach within his historical context: after Hegel, certainly, but before Nietzsche, before Heidegger, before Wittgenstein, before Rorty--but very possibly anticipating in part elements of the thought of all those great thinkers. A sort of proto-pragmatist phenomenology?

> 79

There is plenty of room outside of both atheism and religion.

The Abrahamic religions, at any rate, traditionally deplore pantheism. Since my own conception of "religious consciousness" hinges on the act and experience of worship, I wonder what would be the form of worship suited to a thoroughgoing pantheism.

Yes, it is important to read Feuerbach quote within his historical context, in particular the longstanding antagonism between religion and philosophy in the Western tradition. Feuerbach was particularly opposed to theology, which he presented as a sort of religious quasi-philosophy. His opponents might fairly characterize the first half of The Essence of Christianity as philosophical quasi-theology.

>80 paradoxosalpha:: "The Abrahamic religions, at any rate, traditionally deplore pantheism."

I think that depends on who is doing the "deploring". Christianity--especially the mystical and apophatic traditions--can easily be understood to lead to a pantheistic or panentheistic viewpoint, if we can take as evidence the number of prominent thinkers through the centuries who have been accused of such an "error".

And this, I think, gives us some good insight into where this conversation is breaking down. I think that Abrahamic thought on the nature of the divine is much more diverse and much more "big tent" than you are giving it credit for.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around theology and religion being opposed to each other. Religionists and theologians certainly seem to think they are on the same team.

> 81 can easily be understood

Traditionally, as I said, they do not understand themselves that way, and when institutional Christianity uses the word pantheism, it is to condemn.

> 82

I am a religionist who avoids making common cause with theologians and typically views them as the enemy. Most of my co-religionists are fairly neutral toward theology. In all my reading, Feuerbach is the theorist who best presents my perspective in this regard.

~82

"I'm still trying to wrap my head around theology and religion being opposed to each other. Religionists and theologians certainly seem to think they are on the same team."

Well, here, let me help. "Religionists" usually believe in some sort of G-d who does things in history or in their lives. He intervenes in human affairs and makes things turn out differently than they would otherwise turn out. (This is, incidentally, why some Jews had such a problem with the destruction of the Second Temple and the Holocaust.)

But to "do something" you have to be connected to physical reality - you (gasp) probably need to be "a part of it."

Further, in the "classical" ("Old Testament" or "pagan") notion of a G-d, G-d wasn't just pure abstract "Love" (whatever that would be). He was more like a teacher or a parent in the OT, and more like an enhanced human being in most forms of paganism.

None of that is acceptable to the theologian, who wants to consider only a Being who is Outside Of Ordinary Reality who is Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omni-present (but really no where at all). Such a being would never get impatient or have any emotions of the beings created in his image. Never. It might "have a plan" but it would be a "mystery" how he would go about implementing that plan, since he really wasn't in this universe and the passage of time or events in the universe was not something with which He would have any direct perception. He could "really" only effect this universe at the beginning by creation, by such things as speaking "Let there be Light." Maybe He'd have to do something abstruse like recreating a part of Himself as a man, having himself killed, resurrecting himself, and having himself ascend to Him. (Much more theological than the original sort of G-d, you see. Not at all like that nasty brute in the OT. )

I think that it isn't that difficult at all to see the difference between the two perspectives.

Well, okay. I've long believed that the category "theology" has an implicit Christian bias built into it, so I won't argue the point as concerns non-Christian religions. But I still don't see how the distinction between theology and religion makes any sense in a Christian context. The distinction wouldn't have made any sense to St. Paul, nor to St. Augustine, nor to St. Anselm, nor to St. Thomas Aquinas, nor to billions of other catechized Christians spread across two millennia.

Is Christianity not a religion?

~86

Yes, it is A religion. It is not, however, the template for all other religions. Further it is oddly essentially different from the religion from which it purportedly arose. It is almost as if one took some Aristotle and some Stoicism and mixed them with a misunderstanding of some Late Second Temple doctrines that (in any case) had little or nothing to do with the core of Judaism in order to make up a completely new composite. Of course, that couldn't be the case.

And, I'm sorry, I must have misunderstood, I thought that this was a discussion in the Let's Talk Religion group, not in the Christianity group.

CAN THERE BE RELIGION WITHOUT THE SUPERNATURAL?

Obviously not! By supernatural is meant the miraculous. Yes, we need miracles to believe in a religion, to have faith. Though people are different, and frequently believe in their childhood religion without thinking about it, it is much easier to believe in a religion that produces miracles, the supernatural. And miracles abound around us, but unfortunately are ignored by most. The Internet is full of proofs of the miraculous, seek and you shall find. Look for:
the uncorrupt, the miracles of the Eucharist, the stigmata, the apparitions of the Virgin Mary, the Shroud of Turin, and you will find the supernatural. Jesus had only three years to conquer the world, and he could not have done it without the supernatural. He produced miracles and lots of it. Just ask him and he will help you, because he said:"Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it will be opened to you." This is supernatural, when what he promised happens.

> 87

Can you suggest the biblical Hebrew word that most closely approximates what we mean when we say "religion" in the modern pluralistic sense? In Arabic, I think it's din, which would be a false cognate in Hebrew, unless I'm mistaken.

"Religion," with its Latin origins, has become hopelessly infected with Christian presuppositions. The genesis of comparative religion over the last few centuries has consistently taken Christianity as the positive paradigm for what constitutes "religion."

Isn't "din" (in Hebrew, I mean) closer to the English "justice" or "proper judgment" as in "Beth Din" (a court) ?

> 90

Like I said, a false cognate. The Arabic din is often translated "faith," and also has the qualities of the word "faith" as used in 21st-century US civic discourse (much as I find that latter usage dismaying).

דת, borrowed from Old Persian, only means 'law' or 'decree' in the OT (e.g., Est 1:13 דת ודין 'law and judgment'), but later shifted.

Dang, I thought that "Old Testament" Hebrew was what we were talking about. It is what modalursine wanted to limit "religion" to above. (Unless you want to talk about classical Arabic or Konine.)

Of course, we never have gotten around to defining either "religion" or the "supernatural" (And for the very good reason that it would kill this game if we did so.)

Interesting account of a man experiencing a supernatural event related to epilepsy and captured on EEG. (In response to OP, this sort of thing doesn't shake me as I think of God as explaining the "why" and science the "how".)

Arzy S, & Schurr R (2016). “God has sent me to you”: Right temporal epilepsy, left prefrontal psychosis. Epilepsy & Behavior : E&B, 60, 7-10 PMID: 27176877

***********************************************
...post-ictal psychosis (PIP)”. PIP is a form of psychotic episode that can occur after epileptic seizures...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/05/14/7755/#.V1A0Ab6gqih