Modernizing the case for God

[malati]

Radhe Radhe


Maybe after finishing our bhajan we can have a read of the following article. It's written in 1980 almost 28 years ago and maybe some of the ideas have been proven wrong or irrelevant, still I believe we will find many things to strengthen our belief in God Krishna. I'm still reading it so I'm not sure if this article is very Christian centric. More of the article next post.

Modernizing the Case for God


Monday, Apr. 07, 1980 , Time magazine

Philosophers refurbish the tools of reason to sharpen arguments for theism



God? Wasn't he chased out of heaven by Marx, banished to the unconscious by Freud and announced by Nietzsche to be deceased? Did not Darwin drive him out of the empirical world? Well, not entirely. In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anyone could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a comeback. Most intriguingly, this is happening not among theologians or ordinary believers—most of whom never accepted for a moment that he was in any serious trouble—but in the crisp, intellectual circles of academic philosophers, where the consensus had long banished the Almighty from fruitful discourse.

Now it is more respectable among philosophers than it has been for a generation to talk about the possibility of God's existence. The shift is most striking in the Anglo-American academies of thought, where strict forms of empiricism have reigned. "What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know," declared Bertrand Russell. And A.J. Ayer, on behalf of logical positivism, decreed that "all utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical." The accepted wisdom was that the only, valid statements were those verifiable through the senses.

Today even atheistic philosophers agree that Ayer's rigid rule is inadequate to deal with human experience. Meanwhile, science, his model for learning, has become less presumptuous and ambitious, its theorizing about cosmic astronomy closer to theology, its promise as savior and absolute explainer of the world somewhat tarnished. In the era of quarks, black holes, physics can seem as baffling as foreign policy in the age of the Ayatullah. Philosophers of science, such as Thomas Kuhn of Princeton, have applied relativism, formerly employed against religion, to scientific knowledge. Cornell President Frank Rhodes, a geologist, once observed that "the qualities that [scientists] measure may have as little relation to the world itself as a telephone number has to its subscriber."

Broad cultural forces are also at work.

Says Douglas Hall, a theologian at Montreal's McGill University: "The experiment with secularism finally proved to be too much for the human psyche to cope with, both in the Marxist world and our world. If you begin to doubt that there is some meaning in the process of history, then you get frightened of your own secularity, and you return to religion."

Though still a distinct minority in secular universities, some philosophers are not only willing to talk about God but to believe in him. In the U.S., 300 of them belong to the Society for Christian Philosophy. Some scholars are attacking atheism and reviving and refining arguments for theism that have been largely unfashionable since the Enlightenment, using modern techniques of analytic philosophy and symbolic logic that were once used to discredit belief.

A generation ago, atheistic empiricists like Harvard's Willard V. Quine were influential simply because "they were the brightest people," says Philosophy Professor Roderick Chisholm of Brown University, adding that now the "brightest people include theists, using a kind of tough-minded intellectualism" that was often lacking on their side of the debate.

The proofs of God's existence, long pursued in impenetrable books and journals, are engaging wider audiences. Last week Mortimer Adler, popular philosopher and guru of the Great Books Program, published How to Think About God:



A Guide for the 20th Century Pagan (Macmillan; $9.95). In September Doubleday will issue the English version of dissident Roman Catholic Theologian Hans Küng's latest, which despite its 850 pages is a huge bestseller in West Germany. The title: Does God Exist?

His predictable answer: yes. Even nonbelievers, Küng writes, know that an unjust world raises the question of morality and, in turn, religion.

Besides that, the 20th century is littered with the sorry results of supplanting God with an absolute force that is not divine, such as the "people" in Nazism or the party in Communism. Küng's lucid analysis contends that atheism's 19th century patriarchs proclaimed their theories but never bothered to prove them. Ludwig Feuerbach, the founder of modern atheism, asserted that religious beliefs were mere projections of mankind's noblest qualities; Küng responds that such philosophers' belief in the goodness of human nature is far more likely to be such a projection.

Whatever atheism's weaknesses, what about the other side? Can God's existence be established by reason, without resorting to the Bible, revelations, church dogmas or a leap of faith?

The attempt is traditionally known as "natural theology," and except for the largely self-contained world of Roman Catholic philosophy, it went out of style more than a century ago.

In the current revival, most arguments still employ the traditional definition of God as a unique personal creative entity.

What is new is the effort to refurbish and enhance the traditional approaches to the problem. A summary of the work being done to put new wine in these old wineskins:


The Moral Proof. This is essentially Küng's approach. Conscience doth make Christians — or at least theists — of us all.

The case builds upon the universal signs among mankind of conscience, of some moral law and of each person's inability to keep it satisfactorily, all of which can not be explained as mere conditioning or self-interest. The source of that spark of conscience, theists contend, is God. The most celebrated exponent, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), wrote that each person's quest for the "highest good" implies the existence of a moral being as the necessary condition for this idea, who is himself the source of all morality.

Updating Kant, Dartmouth Scholar Ronald Green argues in Religious Reason (Oxford; $12) that though skeptics may think primitive instincts or emotions are the basis for religion, faith actually stems from the sophisticated reasoning process that distinguishes humans from animals. To Green, man must seek an independent, coherent source for his morality. Although Kant ended with a personal God, Green will only go so far as to postulate "some kind of supreme moral causal agency," whether a personal deity or Hinduism's impersonal karma.

[Deva]

I will begin comments here by addressing this one very pertinent detail in Malati's post: "Maybe after finishing our bhajan we can have a read of the...article." I don't mean to nit pick and sidetrack but, as said, I think this point is very pertinent. In fact, I think it is very telling of whether it merits getting into discussing the rest of the post at al.

First of, what does it mean that one "finishes" one's bhajan? In principle bhajan is uninterrupted, anushilanam. So for the actual bhajanya, reading an article is also bhajan. So where is the question of first going to "do" bhajan, as if you go and take care of some transaction, and then you get your intellect going afterwards as a separte activity? This 'understanding' of bhajan is in principle faulty. So, what can be really added by developing an opinion based on such false premise?

Then there is the "our" bhajan. Why the assumption that everyone's bhajan is uniform? For example, Nitai likes to think that Dawkins, by his ideas, worships what most people would call God. It must be conceded to Nitai that, if such worship is indeed sprung out from the soul - it is indeed a form of bhajan! Yes there are rules for worship/rituals, there are traditions, but if one is going to get into a discussion of the merits of specific ideas and events vis a vis bhajan, then please do not say, "lets first finish our bhajan and then 'after' look into these ideas". Once you finish your bhajan, my friend, you finish your source of life including your power of reasoning and understanding. Better keep that bhajan going alight like the grand olympic torch of the soul. ;D

[madanmohandas]

I thought it was
Thus concsience doth make cowards of us all.

[subala]

I've just ordered this book

www.amazon.com/Case-God-Karen-Armstrong/dp/0307269183/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246994778&sr=8-1

from Amazon after reading a review in The Sunday Times (UK)......

[malati]

To the unknown poster called Bhakti

I normally dont talk to strangers whose normal engagement in an internet forum is to hit and run. But I'll reply.

Of course the goal of our bhajan is Krishna anusilanam, uninterrupted and unending.

Maybe I should have used the word sadhana instead because most devotees operate on the "actual" level and not on the "ideal" level (non-stop and of the highest quality of engagement) which is appropriately called bhajan.

When I said after finishing our bhajan I was using the word based on a common usage, in my case my bhajan consists of my daily mental seva. And in that context, that activity has a beginning and ending.

Bhajan can be also commonly understood as worshipping by singing.


Continuation


(3 of 6)
The Mental Proof. In this formulation, an all-intelligent Being is offered as the only explanation for the power of reason and for humanity's other nonmaterial qualities of mind and imagination. A contemporary restatement is the 1947 classic Miracles by the late English literary critic C.S. Lewis, the century's most read apologist for God. Lewis dismissed the philosophy that mind results from nature: "If any thought is valid, an eternal, self-existent Reason must exist and must be the source of my own imperfect and intermittent rationality."

America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God, Alvin Plantinga of Michigan's Calvin College, develops a related argument from one of the pressing issues in modern epistemology. Though it sounds strange to the man in the street, philosophers ponder how an individual can know that there is any creature besides himself who thinks, feels and reasons, or how he can know that anything ever existed in the past. How, for instance, can we know if another person is in pain? Plantinga answers that such knowledge is acquired through analogy, and in God and Other Minds (Cornell; $13.50) he makes an intricate case that this is the way believers know God. Since it is perfectly plausible to infer that other minds exist, he thinks it is reasonable to believe that God does as well.

The Experiential Proof. Because religious experiences are so widespread, this argument runs, there must be something (or rather, Someone) inspiring them. Skeptics, of course, reply that experiences are subjective, hence unreliable as evidence, and besides they can be explained apart from God. Harvard's Quine, for example, dismisses beliefs as the product of "tradition, wishful thinking or something in the genes." However, one of Britain's most distinguished zoologists, Alister Hardy, begs to wonder. A project he founded at Oxford has issued a rigorous scientific study of 3,000 religious experiences, and reports a striking—and intriguing—commonality among them.

The Teological Proof. Here the infinitely complex structure of the universe is used to argue the necessary existence of an intelligent Designer. In English Archdeacon William Paley's famous analogy of 1802, anyone who sees a watch is forced to assume the existence of a watchmaker who made it. The marvels of nature's design, from snowflakes to developing embryos, are comforting buttresses to faith for many people.

Since the Enlightenment, though, philosophers have not been impressed. The great skeptic was David Hume (1711-76), who scoffed at the design argument because nature is so savage and wasteful that it might have been the work of "some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance." Turned inside out, the proof is really a question: Could this intricate universe have evolved by pure trial and error? The last major philosopher to promote the argument, Britain's F.R. Tennant, wrote in 1934: "Presumably the world is comparable with a single throw of the dice. And common sense is not foolish in suspecting the dice to have been loaded."

more next post

[Sambandha]

Malati, just to get this straight once and for all, since you keep repeating it, we are all strangers here. You may insist otherwise but the truth is all you do here is talk to strangers. You don't know anyone really. Subala, Madanmohan, VS, Bhakti - here, for you, these are just names. Even Nitai, nearly a stranger. As for hit and run, that too, you do as well. Like everyone else.

So slightly back off would you ;D on the "strangers" theme and address the point raised. Please?

That said, the point still stands: call it sadhana or singing devotional songs and it does not make any difference. If your activity in the morning is 'devotional', and in the afternoon not so much, then (where bhakti is concerned) you got a problem. You say the 'common usage', the 'actual', is a great distance from the ideal, but that, precisely, is the point: krishna anushilanam is where all activities, at all times, are of the same nature. It is not the type of activity that makes it bhakti but the state of consciousness in which that activity is performed . Sitting in meditation on the lila and reading an article on atheism should be equally relevant for one's bhakti, otherwise (where bhakti is concerned) there is something wrong with one of the two. Or both. The ideal, or actual bhakti, is not a state apart from your life right now, and definitely not a place somewhere in a different cosmos. The ideal is the acceptance that life is a continuum of one reality only: Radha, Krishna and all that their love generates, in that order precisely.

Fact is, devotees get into this notion of considering a set of physical and/or mental routine to be 'bhajan' while everything else is maya. And then go and read articles etc. with the preemptive stand of accepting only the portions that agree with their practices which are, in reality, not much more than habits formed quasi mechanically (memes). This is the kanishta type of achivement and the question again is: what will be the value of our view of the world vis a vis bhakti if our understanding of bhakti itself is not sufficiently developed? It would be something similar to trying to discuss personal notions, very dear to our hearts notions, with um... strangers.

[malati]

continuation

(4 of 6)

Forsaken by philosophers, the proof was brought up to date last year by James E. Horigan, a Denver lawyer intrigued by scientific theory. In Chance or Design? (Philosophical Library; $13.95) he contends that narrowly antireligious Darwinism ignores the way in which inanimate nature is in harmony with organic evolution. Nor, he asserts, can evolutionary theory possibly explain the rapid emergence of the large brain in the developing human species.

The Ontological Proof. This, the most controversial approach, moves from a mental concept of God to his actual existence. It was originated by Anselm, the 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury who defined God as "a being than which nothing greater can be thought." The Archbishop reasoned that since existence would have to be part of any such perfect and necessary being, this being must actually exist. This is "too good to be true," says one skeptic, and even one of its current defenders admits that it "looks too much like word magic."

The method lay in disrepute after Kant supposedly demolished it, until Norman Malcolm, then at Cornell, suddenly "claimed in a 1960 article that it was partly defensible. Since then it has been the most debated proof among philosophers.

Three current advocates renovate it by applying a technique known as modal logic: Plantinga; Unitarian Charles Hartshorne, a follower of Alfred North Whitehead's "process" philosophy, now retired from the University of Texas; and Roman Catholic Layman James F. Ross of the University of Pennsylvania.

In The Nature of Necessity (Oxford; $8.50), Plantinga, who had long opposed ontological theories, explains that his mind was changed through the curious logical process of speculating about "possible worlds" in which things could be different. For example, he says, Raquel Welch has "impressive assets" in our world. But there are possible worlds in which she is "mousy and 50 lbs. overweight," and others in which she is totally nonexistent, adding: "What Anselm means to suggest is that Raquel Welch enjoys very little greatness in those worlds in which she does not exist."

Ross, a leader in modernizing the thought of medieval scholars, favors the revision of Anselm done by John Duns Scotus (1265-1308) but does some renovation himself. In the forthcoming new edition of his Philosophical Theology (Hackett; $17.50), Ross is bold enough to claim that he has an airtight proof that "remains unscathed" after a decade of scrutiny. Ross does this with his "Principle E" (for explicability), which is virtually inexplicable to the uninitiated. Roughly, it means that it is possible for everything, including God's existence, to be explained, but that God's nonexistence does not admit an explanation.

Even atheistic philosophers grant that by the latest rules of logic, the updaters of Anselm are right: if it is even possible that a highest conceivable being exists, then he must exist in actuality. The trouble is, the atheists do not accept that he is even possible.


more to come
Jaya Sri Radhe

[malati]

(5 of 6)

The Cosmological Proof. The term applies technically to any argument for God through reflection upon the natural world. But most often "cosmological" refers to sweeping generalizations about ultimate origins and why the cosmos exists at all. Evolutionary schools of thought do not entertain such notions because they fall, by definition, outside what can be observed or tracked. If such questions are never asked, of course, they require no answer. Bertrand Russell once remarked in a BBC debate that the universe is "just there, and that's all." He was convinced that "all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system."

The classic cosmological inquirer was Thomas Aquinas (1224-74), and the classic modern innovator is Canadian Jesuit Bernard J.F. Lonergan, whose "transcendental Thomism" in Insight (Philosophical Library; $10) justifies Aquinas to the modern world through a complex philosophy of human understanding. Chicago's Mortimer Adler has long been interested in Aquinas' thought. Though not formally religious he nonetheless pondered the God problem for most of his 75 years before writing his readable How to Think About God.

Aquinas reasoned that each effect must have a cause and that an endless chain must proceed back to a primordial First Cause or Prime Mover. In How to, Adler rejects that starting point because a universe with a beginning presupposes the Creator that it seeks to prove. Therefore Adler assumes that the universe had no beginning. He also rejects the idea that a higher cause underlies and explains all phenomena in the universe, on the ground that natural processes provide sufficient explanation.

That leaves the most esoteric of Aquinas' "five ways" of proving God, from "contingency." Things can be divided into two categories: "contingent" ones that could either exist or not exist, and "necessary" ones that cannot not exist. The latter is a category of one, namely God. The reason that anything at all exists, cosmologists argue, is that there must be a "necessary" being.

At one time Adler embraced Aquinas' proof, then for decades he thought it did not work because although everything in the universe is contingent, nothing ceases to exist absolutely (e.g. burning wood only changes form), so no God is needed to explain the existence of contingent things. Last May he suddenly changed his mind again after applying the "possible worlds" approach. Adler speculated that the universe is only one of many possible universes, any of which —including this actual universe—can just as easily not exist as exist. The universe is "radically contingent," the only thing capable of not existing and leaving behind absolutely nothing. An "efficient cause" is needed to explain "the actual existence here and now of a merely possible cosmos," something that preserves it in being and prevents it from being replaced by nothingness. Color that cause God. Philosopher Ross contends that this interesting argument was stated more successfully in the 13th century by his hero, Duns Scotus. Adler does not think so.

[Dr No]

This proof, that proof. Thisism thatism... blah, blah, blickety blah, blah blah...

We need a world full of free thinkers, not one of wolves and sheep, and in the case of what we have on hand these days, its mainly sheep, and the wolves are mostly toothless anyways.

What is the real danger in religion? Is it harmless, let alone actually beneficial? It depends entirely upon one's attitude towards it. There is no escaping it. We have all been brought up in one that was the family faith. Some people question it all, others pathetically fail to question any of it. Is it some great attribute that we can brag about as the species homo religiosus? If so, then how exactly is it such a great attribute? Set the other worldly experiences apart from those ludicrous trappings. Then there is something to work with. Philosophy of science is the only worthwhile philosophical pursuit. Where is Dr. Peter Venkman when you need him?

[Nurse Nay]

Proofs are necessary for science and God is necessary for humans. Humans' necessity is proof to the existence of God while verifiable data is proof that there is such thing as science. Nothing is harmful until someone gets poked in the eye by a microscope or something.

[Anonymous]

Jul 7, 2009 12:27:12 GMT -6 @Deva said:

I don't mean to nit pick and sidetrack

Well, you are nitpicking and sidetracking.

[That person]

Well, you are nitpicking and sidetracking.

And that is a good thing, as explained in my nitpicking and sidetracking. Who can discuss anything that begins with "maybe after finishing our bhajan". If that is a premise for discussion, no one will be really eligible. Some have never started their bhajan, some never finish anyway. So, perhaps we can begin discussing this stuff after we agree on an uniform definition of bhajan eh.

[Dr Noway]

where is nitai? he will discuss.

[Nitaidas]

Jul 7, 2009 12:27:12 GMT -6 @Deva said:

I will begin comments here by addressing this one very pertinent detail in Malati's post: "Maybe after finishing our bhajan we can have a read of the...article." I don't mean to nit pick and sidetrack but, as said, I think this point is very pertinent. In fact, I think it is very telling of whether it merits getting into discussing the rest of the post at al.

First of, what does it mean that one "finishes" one's bhajan? In principle bhajan is uninterrupted, anushilanam. So for the actual bhajanya, reading an article is also bhajan. So where is the question of first going to "do" bhajan, as if you go and take care of some transaction, and then you get your intellect going afterwards as a separte activity? This 'understanding' of bhajan is in principle faulty. So, what can be really added by developing an opinion based on such false premise?

Then there is the "our" bhajan. Why the assumption that everyone's bhajan is uniform? For example, Nitai likes to think that Dawkins, by his ideas, worships what most people would call God. It must be conceded to Nitai that, if such worship is indeed sprung out from the soul - it is indeed a form of bhajan! Yes there are rules for worship/rituals, there are traditions, but if one is going to get into a discussion of the merits of specific ideas and events vis a vis bhajan, then please do not say, "lets first finish our bhajan and then 'after' look into these ideas". Once you finish your bhajan, my friend, you finish your source of life including your power of reasoning and understanding. Better keep that bhajan going alight like the grand olympic torch of the soul. ;D

Well, I guess I better weigh in here. First of all, thanks to Malati for posting this interesting article and raising the question of "modernizing" the case for God. The article, at least those parts I have read seems reasonably accurate, though dated.

I guess I should start by commenting on Deva's nit-picking. It is nit-picky but it raises a good question and one that we should entertain for a while whether we ever actually come to an agreement on it or not. What do we mean by bhajan? It is clear it means different things to different people. To some people, myself and probably Malati included, it means a particular set of practices that we do everyday, on the basis of the instructions and/or examples of our gurudevas, and thus when we say we have finished our bhajan we mean that we have finished that daily set of practices, not our "bhajan" in the large sense of eternal worship of R and K and G. I am sure that this is what Malati meant and thus Deva was being somewhat dishonest in taking her in a sense other than her obvious one. Yes, there is the assumption that we are all doing bhajan of some sort and that is probably not true, at least not in the more restricted sense mentioned above. But Malati was just being generous there, I think.

There is of course always the sense that none of us can claim to being really doing bhajan. Real bhajan is something rare and really special. There is a kind of amusing story that Jagadish and i just encountered in our work on a hagiography of the great bhajananandi guru Siddha Manohar Das Babaji. Here is an excerpt:

One day around 9 or 10 in the morning, Krishna Dassji was sitting doing mala and I (Navadvipa Das) said: "Dada, there is no limit to your good fortune. You are the descendant of Brahmins. Celibate since you were a child. You have visited the four (major) holy places. You have taken to the practice of renunciation and are serving your Gurudev. Moreover you are doing bhajan."

Krsna Dassji replied: "Yes, Dada, but it is certainly by the grace of all of you that I do bhajan."

Behind us Maharaj-ji (Siddha Manohar Das Babaji) had come silently to the tulsi bush and was standing. We had not noticed him. In a voice deep as a cloud he said: "What? Krishna Dass? You are doing bhajan?"

I stood up in surprise and prostrated before him and Krishna Dass in embarrassment turned red all the way to his ears.

I said: "But Krishna Dassji does bhajan. If he does not do bhajan, then who else does?"

Maharaj-ji replied in a pensive mood: "It is not bhajan; it is the conceit of bhajan. Do you know anything about what bhajan is?"

I replied: "Sir, if you do not tell us how will we know?"

The answer was that when any thought other than a thought about Bhagavan strikes one like poison, burns like a fire in the mind---in that mind there is bhajan. In that kind of mind absorption in Bhagavan is given the name bhajan. Hearing that answer I remained silent for awhile.

In this sense of bhajan nobody who frequents this site really does bhajan.

[Nitaidas]

Jul 10, 2009 19:16:27 GMT -6 @Nurse Nay said:

Proofs are necessary for science and God is necessary for humans. Humans' necessity is proof to the existence of God while verifiable data is proof that there is such thing as science. Nothing is harmful until someone gets poked in the eye by a microscope or something.

What is this detached thing you call science? Science is a human activity. It is necessary for human beings, more necessary and better for humans than religion or the idea of God. What need have we humans for God? Religion and the idea of God have only acted as crutches in human history. They have slowed human development and growth down, kept countless humans in ignorance and suffering, and given the human race a sense of helplessness. It is time for the human race to leave behind its childhood fascinations with such fictions and grow up. That, as I see it, is the whole point and brilliance of the Caitanya tradition. The focus of human consciousness has been shifted by the advent of Mahaprabhu to the human realm (or perhaps human consciousness shifted and Mahaprabhu was the response), to love and intimacy between humans. We have outgrown the gods of old and now it is time to embrace our friend and lover as equals or even his betters. Remember what happens to Krsna when he meets Radha and the Sakhis in the forest in his four-armed Visnu form? It's an exciting time to be alive!