signs of stendhal

Thanks very much for taking the time to read and respond to my post!

I agree that conversations (within and beyond the scope of science and religion) limit themselves to a very small range of productivity if they fail to consider the origins of their own rationale. When you take a step back, most ontological theories are actually much more harmonious than we inadvertently make them by omitting context.

But harmony does not mean interchangeability. The basic logical fallacy in theist/atheist debates is the attempt to make two specialized systems of understanding comment on each other as though one deserves the final say. In fact both will always evaluate things according to their own (limited) interests, again presuming competitive rather than complimentary priorities.

For example, in the case of atheists who ask believers for ‘proof’ of God — this is not a move toward mutual understanding so much as an affirmation of the atheistic value set, i.e., empiricist assumptions that all truth…

1. can and must be proven in order to be taken seriously,
2. is invariably invariable, i.e., objective,
3. is proven by measurable and reproducible perceptions of the five senses, 
4. can and should be transmitted from one person to another.

Those are perfectly reasonable expectations to a scientist because they mirror the scientific paradigm. And make no mistake, we’ve needed that scientific paradigm to build a healthy, free, progressive modernity. However, I think a theist argument could reasonably claim not that those premises are incorrect, but that they’re simply inappropriate for making conclusions about God, rebutting respectively:

1. Some perceivable truths are still beyond what we humans can explain. To reason otherwise is anthropocentric. 
2. Excluding all notions of subjective, private, and complex truths actually restricts rather than enriches our capacity to understand reality.
3. There are other valid ‘senses’ of perception that must be developed on an individual basis [implied: through some kind of religious practice].
4. We are fundamentally unable to explain some truths to each other because we are not meant to, the point of personal Enlightenment being that it is only understood through personal epiphany, which is only achieved through personal practice [of certain moral codes]. The limitation of what can be “proven” about religious claims is therefore not a weak point of faith but an intentional delineation between those who have actually earned sacred insight through right living and those who’d rather just Q&A about it — the latter transreligiously derided as “the learned and the wise.”

So asking a believer to prove the existence of God through science is kind of like asking a scientist to prove a theorem by praying for God’s confirmation. These are mismatched appeals to conceptually distinct authorities. 

It may seem like I’m making a case for the superiority of theist values, but again, it’s this whole notion of ‘superiority of values’ that I’m trying to quash. Obviously I love science, skepticism, and academic rigor. If my persuasions skew toward pro-theism here it’s only to attempt balance in an environment where heels are dug more deeply into the empirical end of the value spectrum. 

I understand why that is, though. The modern mind clings to scientific intelligence because it’s still smarting from the way enthusiast intelligence so violently betrayed the project of civilization (see: the Middle Ages). Thus we unconsciously heed the whispers of that collective trauma: Oh dear, we can’t have mystery, we can’t have ecstasy, we can’t have faith because they are too corruptible. From hereon all belief must be justified by peer review. No respectable person can hold unique and genuine insights because if so any quack who claims them can start a monstrous revolution. It’s logical — but to me it’s also sad. It throws the proverbial baby of enlightenment out with the bathwater of religion.

And it’s doubly sad to me as an academic, because not only does it implicitly teach students that the world is hostile to any inner authority they might muster, it also makes a lot of their curriculum more boring than necessary. See, monopolization by the empirical value set not only frames how we look at the future, but also how we edit the past. It has airbrushed over a lot of the mystical drama that got us as far as we are in arts and sciences, resulting in an incomplete and rather dry version of our evolution and the course material derived from it.

I could pick a million examples, but one that is personally true for me is the spiritual sterilization of mathematics. In high school I could barely stay awake while plotting x’s and y’s on graph paper, mostly because I didn’t see the point. To me, turning algebraic equations into Cartesian coordinates and back was as useful as folding and unfolding laundry. Had some honest teacher ever told me that René Descartes developed all that in order to decode The friggin’ Matrix, by God I would have pulled a muscle from raising my hand. But no. What does History have to do with Math? What does Religion have to do with Science? What does Context have to do with Conclusion? What does Epistemology have to do with Knowledge?

Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything.

We’re at the point where we ought to stop fearing that, stop eschewing a whole realm of knowledge just because it spooks us out. That is backward; that is unscientific. Why refuse to consider that the world is complex, and that full comprehension of reality (if even possible) may require pluralistic systems of knowledge, of which those that can be shared are done so through science and those that can’t are equally valid?

And now here’s where I characteristically insist that the bridge between these realms of shared and private knowledge is the technologies of art, music, and literature. To move consciousness forward via a holistic epistemology that doesn’t reflexively reject either empiricism or enthusiasm, those must be at the foundation of our reformed society.

So start funding them, bitches.