Christianity and the phenomena of religion interest me.
It seems like one of the most contradictory aspects of life on earth. On the one hand it seems like a supremely influential components of every day life and on the other hand it contradict almost every other experience.
People sit in church and affirm beliefs they hold to without a single shred of evidence apart from very personal experiences that can legitimately be interpreted in many other ways apart from the god-hypotheses. Still they affirm Christianity as “truth” based on a certain set of assumptions.
Then, they get in their cars and drive home and every single decision they make from the time they walk out the church doors are predicated upon a completely different set of assumptions.
Even more intriguing is the fact that the assumptions that allow them to call Christianity “truth” and the assumptions they use when they for example select a restaurant to go to after church are mutually exclusive.
This seeming paradox is of HUGE interest.
PART 1
A few months ago I worked through The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse. Carse is a master at analyzing religion from a fresh, new perspective. It is one of the most refreshing discussions on religion and belief available.
I mention Carse because he offers in my view one of the best descriptions of the characteristics of faith and religion and before anybody commit to any of the faiths of the world I suggest that they first read Carse.
His insights de-mystify much of the god-hypothesis and are a useful first step for anybody thinking about the “why” behind the god-hypothesis and religion.
Why do people believe in god?
I am in Cape Town and these questions dont want to let go of me.
The weather bureau warned that the first storm for the winter was on its way. It would hit the Cape Peninsular by the week-end of 15 May 2009.
By Thursday the sky was ominously black. All was quite. The clouds started to take on some strange shapes. Seagulls flew more nervously.
Friday night the rain started.
Tristan, my 11 year old son, had a rugby match the next morning. When Julie tried to get us all ready to go to the match I protested that its going to rain and they would never make the kids play in this storm.
She tried to get hold of the coordinator from school. No luck.
We made it to the rugby fields. Not even the match convener showed up, thinking that no parent in his or her right mind would think that ANY match could be plaid.
But it was a beautifully stormy day in Cape Town and we decided to take a drive around the Peninsular.
As we wound our way down to the historical town of Simons Town on the M3 past the back of Table Mountain, I was thinking . . .
Religion and Christianity is nothing more than cultural expressions. Superstitious beliefs.
Humans develop faster when we do it collectively.
Some humans always think about “better” systems. Things that will make our society function better. These people then packaged these “better systems” and sell it to the rest of the humans. They package it as ideologies.
We experiment a bit with the ideologies and if it works we adopt it into our large cultural practices. Some set out again to develop better social systems, usually parallel to the development of technology. Again the new ideas are packaged into ideologies and experimented with. And on and on the cycle goes. . .
Take any of our great social institutions like democracy and capitalism and even something like short-term insurance.
Also, consider some of our great social experiments like communism, fascism and slavery.
The systems that “worked” survived.
In a similar way people thought about unseen “powers”. It is evident from history that the ideas of these “powers” were developed into the concept of different “gods” and later developed by some into the concept of one supreme “god”.
The reason for these developments had nothing to do with the question of the ultimate purpose in life (why are we here?). For the earliest people, the concept of “powers” and later of gods and even later of one god had to do with every day survival. About crops failing or yielding. People getting better after a sick-bed or dying. Bread and butter issues.
Less than 100 years ago the people in the small North Free State Farm where my grandfather was a farmer thought that God caused his crops to fail because he bought modern tractors and did not plow his fields the way the good lord intended it to be plowed using plow and oxen.
The god-hypothesis was a cultural development. Something that exist purely in human thought.
Nowhere in nature do we have an example of any animal responding to any god-concept.
It is people who look at natural events and explain it with the god-hypothesis. It is not nature that bows itself before god and causes humans to come to no other conclusion except that there is a god.
So, the first important consideration in the “why” behind faith is that the concept is cultural. Its development can be traced historically. It is a system that started out as a way for us to “manage” and explain nnatural systems such as weather systems.
PART 2
We stopped just past Simons Town on the side of the road for breakfast. Breadrolls and chips. It drizzled slightly.
When we drove past Cape Point, it started to rain and the wind picked up. The big storm was definitely about to hit!
We drove on to Scarborough where we turned to the beach.
the "big picture"
Cape Penninsular
Soetwater (Sweet Water) Beach
Scarborough is definitely one of my most favorite places on earth! It is far from Cape Town. Undeveloped. Few people. Unspoiled.
The wind was ice cold. The sea was rough.
I could not resist and I walked into the sea.
The water was warmer than I am used to at Sea Point where freezing cold sea currents converge.
For a second I forgot about the business that I am getting off the ground with a friend of mine from the United States and the question about faith.
After splashing around in the water for a while, we drove a few kilometers past Misty Beach to Soetwater (Sweet Water) and I spotted a few surfers with wetsuits in the huge storm swells.
The temptation was too much! We stopped and I joined them. I looked towards Scarborough and the majestic cliffs of the Table Mountain range forming an amazing backdrop to the small little town and the amazing waves and the breathtaking sea.
With humungous waves breaking over me I was thinking that this is the most beautiful site on earth and I am the luckiest man alive!
As I swam in a very stormy sea, the thought hits me that the concept of “purpose” and “design” is a question that only makes sense to the human mind.
A much as the concept of god has absolutely basis in reality apart from our superstitions, so the question of our purpose on earth is something that is meaningless outside its cultural context. Like the question of God, it is NOT something that comes to us from nature.
The church loves to bring up this question as a reason of the “why” of Christianity. As if Christianity is the only rational answer to the “why” of life itself!
In answering the Christian claim that Christianity is the answer to the “why” of life I have always asked the counter question that there is no reason why Christianity should be the answer to the “why” of life and not any of the other religions of the world.
Even if one would concede that there may be a god, why should god be the Christian god? No Christian can give a proper answer to this. The Christian faith itself can not deal with it.
Their reply is always that they know this in their hearts. That somehow the Holy Spirit revealed this to them and that they don’t have to give a rational answer to the question. Everybody from every cult and faith throughout history has always claimed the same and the answer remains a nonsensical and self contradictory one.
It occurred to me that the question of the “why” of life is itself a cultural phenomenon. Like Christianity and faith itself.
It means absolutely nothing to the sea. The cliffs around me. The trillions upon trillions of molecules combining and reacting with each other throughout the universe.
Even the word “purpose” and “design” have no meaning outside the human mind. These are only models we use to describe a process (itself a model) that we perceive with our senses and that we can compute with our minds.
The fact that a system exists is not proof that the system was designed or has a purpose in the sense that we think about “intelligent purpose”.
The fact that we speak is no proof that speech was “intended” no more than the fact that a bird sits on a branch is evidence that the bird was intended or made for “sitting on the branch”. The fact that we exist is not proof that we were intended to exist.
At the same time it occurred to me that if there are any significant discovery as to the “why” behind life and if this should ever become a relevant question to ask, this would probably be discovered by the people who are looking for answers and not the people who are satisfied that they have discovered the answer. In other words, Christians who believe they already have the answer would probably NOT be the ones to discover this.
I wondered if scientists would for example discover one day that the universe is governed by a completely different set of “rules” that exist outside our universe, of which our universe and its laws is a mere by-product; and if science will discover that behind this “different set of rules” is a life form that exist as a result of realities that are so different that only people who transform and become one of these life forms can ever understand it – then science will have discovered the ultimate answer to life, death and everything. The anwer to the “why” behind our existance.
But we must first understand that even the above statement is predicated upon a model of cause-and-effect and as useful as this model may be at the current point in time, it is only a model.
The fact that we have the model and the fact that the model is useful does not mean that the model is true in the sense that it has some kind of “independant existance”.
The first observation must still be that cause-and-effect is only a model. It IS NOT TRUTH in any absolute sense.
Human thought and human culture does not determine reality. The fact that we ask a question does not mean that it is a valid question.
PART 3
Tristan is standing on the beach watching me swim. He signals to me that it’s about to start raining again. When I look up the sky is blacker than it was a few minutes before.
I start running out of the water. “T” covers himself with my jacket, but the rain comes down as spiky arrows that sting your skin. It “really” starts to rain and “T” and I run!
When we get to the car its still raining. “T” is drenched from the rain. Julie and Lauren are waiting in the car. I put on a T-Shirt and another jacket and we start driving back to Cape Town.
I try to get my mind off the cold . . .
I realize that the concept of faith has been one of the most irrelevant matters in the history of the world.
Take matters of marriage for example. Thousands of years ago one man had many wives. That morality changed over time – within one system of faith and one family of faiths. People gravitated to monogamy and this became the morality.
Another example is the large wars that were fought over the last few hundred years. The American Revolution, the First and Second World War. Christianity had absolutely NO impact on any of the thousands upon thousands of people who commissioned these wars, despite the facts that they all professed the same faith.
Millions upon millions of churchgoing faithful went to war with each other! Christianity and faith did not matter one bit.
The treatment of the Jews and slavery demonstrates to us that Christianity did not have any effect on these social ideologies in any shape or form. Economics and superstition played a much more dominant role. Christianity was not influential enough to stop the slaughtering of millions of people.
IN THE MIX of influences upon cultural developments it may have some bearing, but its major role has definitely changed from a means by which we try and manage crop failure and matters of health to the primary way that we as humans manage our superstitions.
It explains why people who go to church and call themselves Christian can be biologists for example. Christian beliefs have been and are becoming more and more irrelevant.
Its winter. Its stormy. As we turn into the street where we live its starts raining big time!!!!!. HEAVY rain! We sprint into the home, leaving all our junk still in the car. We will get it when the rain stops.
I am FREEZING cold and have mild hypothermia. I open the taps to the bath, strip down and get in the hot water. My skin burns read in the hot water, but my body registers the heat and welcomes it.
I soak in the warm water . . . and as I do another thought hits me. . . .
I think about human thought.
It can not be that our human thought is disconnected from the environment. I have long suspected that this may be one of the reasons for the usefulness of mathematics. I am sure it is not the full story, but I suspect it plays a role.
It is safe to say that what we understand as “development” and “progression” and “ordering” are inadequate labels that we give to a process that we have only partial glimpses of with our human mind, our primitive mental models and our limited five senses.
There is little doubt with me that we will one day understand how we develop language, grammar and comprehension. There is also little doubt in my mind that the developmental path of language, grammar and comprehension has its basis in the material world we find around us.
But even if the developmental path of language gives us a clue of its origins, it still does not mean that language or comprehension or abstract thought is limited to the world where it originated from. Thought may be “from” somewhere and become “more than” where it originates from.
Living system is always more than its constituent parts or its origins. It will be “like”, but it will at the same time probably always be “more than”.
This means that even the question of “intelligent design” is a very natural question to ask. Even if there is no intelligent reason behind the development of human thought, it seems to be consistent with the process of thought to ask the question – if we purpose, is there not a probability that we have been purposed as well?
But this question comes from the matrix of human thought. We ask this question because of three reasons:
- we have the ability to purpose ourselves;
- secondly, we are conscious of this process;
- and thirdly, the question is something that is not inconsistent with the matrix of human thought.
There is absolutely no evidence that we ask the question because of anything we find in nature. In the same way as we have no evidence that animals or rocks “worship” a god or responds to a god-force (as Christians claim without any basis for the claim), in exactly the same way we have no evidence of purpose besides the three factors that we have mentioned above.
Let’s assume something interesting to illustrate the point. Let’s assume that our minds evolve over time and that we become capable of observing more about our world than we do with our five senses and that we develop a new matrix that will manage the interaction with this new perceived world (what else is our current thought than a process that manages our social interaction and our interaction with our world through our senses).
And let’s call this super-thought, based on super-perception. And let’s assume that in this new matrix we work with a better model of reality than cause-and-effect.
There will be no god and there will be no “purpose” in that world and it will be completely “natural”.
This example illustrates how the matrix of thought governs and limits activity within that matrix. We are slaves to our matrix of thought.
It demonstrates how we will never be able to function outside the matrix. But, on the other hand, it also illustrates that it is possible to look at any system like Christianity and to go to the matrix and say without any shadow doubt that in terms of the matrix claimed by the system of Christianity and in terms of the matrix of human thought generally, the system of Christianity is not a possible description of life, death and everything.
Human thought itself is so new and so young – and all indications are that in a few hundred years from now we will no longer have the scourge of religion or faith with us.
I get out of the bath. The wind is howling outside! I drink some lemon juice and coffee.
The whole experience of the last few days leaves me invigorated. The salt taste of the water in my mouth, the gigantic waves breaking over me, the freezing cold wind against my skin, the richness of the amazing questions we can contemplate, the warm water, the coffee.
I am amazed by life!
)
Pre-Reconstruction Rubble of Frauenkirche and Statue of Martin Luther in Dresden, Germany. It was bombed by the Allied Forces in WWII. I did not take the pic, but this is how I saw it when I visited Dresden in 1991
