Quantum Non-Linearity: The James Moar Emails. Epistemology and God: Seeking God, Yes, But Finding Him?

Saturday, August 10, 2013

The James Moar Emails. Epistemology and God: Seeking God, Yes, But Finding Him?

"Speak to me God!"

My last post was about epistemology, a subject very pertinent to what follows.

I’m using this post as an opportunity to release this PDF document (which can be downloaded) recording an email correspondence I had with somebody called James Moar who was attending my church at the time* (Circa 2011). James was having difficulties with his faith and his opening correspondence was very candid about this fact. His problem was basically epistemic: Does our experience of life justify a belief in God’s existence and our belief in His daily involvement in our lives? Is God just a fantasy object, a product and only a product of the human imagination? I felt that James’problems with the faith had an existential component in that it was sourced very much in his own particular experience or lack of experience of God. This opened the way for him to query the authenticity of Christian experience in general. In fact the last line of his first email went thus:

I'm beginning to think that Christianity is just a package of group behaviours and narrative weaving based on a narrow selection of anecdotes.

I had to agree that this observation by James was not only challenging but also had a lot of truth in it: In evangelical and fundamentalist Christian communities one finds that otherwise fairly prosaic events, simply the cosmos doing business as usual, are interpreted using what appears to be very a intimate knowledge of the Divine mind. Oft times all these interpretations look to be very fanciful and arbitrary “spiritual spin”.

James appears to have been influenced by the impassioned evangelicals in as much as he was taking them at their word that God’s presence is very manifest and apparent. However, he was beginning to think that God’s presence is less manifest in the genuinely sensational than it is in sensational spiritual spin! That spin is capable of sensationalising even the most humdrum! It is no surprise then that James was looking for the authentic “in-yer-face” empirical evidence for God and not just melodramatic “spiritual spin”. The Christian experience, the evangelical Christian experience especially, with its baroque interpretative elaborations had begun to look to him like an all too human fabrication constructed on very shaky foundations.

I am afraid to say that all told I wasn't a lot of help to James; it goes without saying that I can’t provide “in-yer-face” spiritual experiences in order to fix an existential crisis. Also, I'm not sure how far he was prepared to move away from the hard, well pronounced and heavy lines of evangelicalism to the lighter touch of a broad brush impressionistic Christianity; my feeling was that for him it was evangelicalism or nothing. All I could do was point to some of the general features of the human predicament that theism addresses in a post-facto way. (See my last post on epistemology). Consequently, our discussion revolved around the validity of using an a priori theological epistemic rather than attempting to synthesise theology from basic experience a posteriori. A posteriorism, though, is very much in accord with James evangelical desire for some spiritual revelation, something which I could not address of course.

If we are going to find God we have to find God in the commonplace and not just in the paranormal.

* This correspondence has been published with permission.

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Saturday, August 10, 2013

The James Moar Emails. Epistemology and God: Seeking God, Yes, But Finding Him?

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