{"id":17188,"date":"2014-05-05T21:17:40","date_gmt":"2014-05-06T01:17:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/?p=17188"},"modified":"2014-05-05T21:17:40","modified_gmt":"2014-05-06T01:17:40","slug":"theism-and-thin-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/theism-and-thin-air\/","title":{"rendered":"Theism and Thin Air"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Supernatural<\/a><\/p>\n

Is there such a thing as the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153supernatural\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean to ask whether there is a being called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153God\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or if there are miracles. Even if God, miracles, and answered prayer are real, are they \u00e2\u20ac\u0153supernatural\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? What do we mean by that term?<\/p>\n

Some people believe that the striking events recorded in scripture did actually happen, but that they were misdescribed by the clueless ancients as if they were supernatural, things that could never happen without divine magic. Such \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Rationalists\u00e2\u20ac\u009d have sought to re-explain these events in scientific terms unavailable to the ancients. A modern example would be members of UFO sects who believe, e.g., that Jesus\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 miraculous conception was an artificial insemination engineered by space aliens. There would have been nothing miraculous about it. Extraordinary, yes. But the aliens are envisioned as flesh-and-blood individuals in possession of advanced technology. The scenario would be much like that hilarious scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home<\/em> when the time-travelling Dr. McCoy rescued Chekov from the barbaric ministrations of late twentieth-century medicine. McCoy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s techniques were perfectly ordinary and mundane in his own eyes but seemed miraculous to patients in the hospital whom he helped along the way. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the way it is with Flying Saucer Jesus. Pretty amazing, but not beyond the limits of what is possible in nature. We might not understand the science yet, but in principle we could one day. But this is not quite what I have in mind.<\/p>\n

I am thinking of two ancient philosophers. I fear we have not caught up with them. Thales of ancient Ionia probably qualifies as both the first scientist and the first philosopher. He invented science when he asked how the rain comes to fall. Religion (or myth) says rain is what happens when Zeus says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Forsooth, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s have some rain here! Chop-chop!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Science, by contrast, tells us (or hopes to tell us) how<\/em> it rains. Even if we still want to say it is the work of Father Zeus, there must be some way<\/em>, some method<\/em>, by which he does it, right?\u00c2\u00a0 If his spoken word does the trick, how? Mustn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t we picture some chain of cause and effect? If we picture Circe casting a spell, mustn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t there be some way in which the spoken formula brings about the desired outcome? Doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t there have to be, say, some kind of property in the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153magic words\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? The syllables have to set loose some vibrations that have an impact on the recipient of the curse, right? Like the radio: the sounds reach your speakers through the medium of radio waves. They don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just get there because somebody says they should.<\/p>\n

If you are just thinking that God says it and it happens, you are talking cartoons. The Koran says, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153He saith unto a thing, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcBe!\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and it is.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But this presupposes that what is about to be created already exists to hear the divine command it must now obey. That paradox, I realize, is offered to us, not hidden from us readers. It is clever and happily displayed, but it still does not make any sense. And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fatal. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s my point: it just doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make any sense, even any theological<\/em> sense.<\/p>\n


\n<\/a>A funny instance of this sort of cartoon supernaturalism is the gospel miracle of Jesus multiplying the loaves and the fish. As David Friedrich Strauss pointed out in his classic book The Life of Jesus Critically Examined<\/em>, the story loses any possible plausibility as soon as we take a close look at it: what the heck are we supposed to envision Jesus doing? Does he take hold of both ends of a fish or a barley roll and then stretch it out like a sponge till it breaks, each half somehow the same size as the original? It is a cartoon, not a possible case of someone using a technique amenable to rational understanding if we only knew more about it.<\/p>\n

By contrast, think of the (desperate) arguments offered by defenders of the (fake) Turin Shroud. At least they have one point in their favor: when they contend that the photo-negative image on the sheet was the result of some kind of radiation flash caused by the power of God resurrecting Jesus, they realize there would have to be some way <\/em>God did it. Even if it was a miracle. right? These \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sindonologists\u00e2\u20ac\u009d are not trying to show what happened in lieu of<\/em> a miracle, as Joe Nickel does when he demonstrates how some medieval painter could have faked the Shroud. No, they rightly understand that, if God reached down and miraculously<\/em> resurrected Jesus, he must have used some means<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If there is<\/em> a method, a way things happen, even in the unseen realm of the gods, then you are envisioning nature<\/em>, albeit a larger frame of reference.<\/p>\n

Epicurus (himself esteemed something of a god by the movement he started) taught that the gods in heaven possess material substance. They occupy space, have volume. Their bodies are made of stuff more rarified than ours. If you look at it this way, at least you know what you are talking about when you say the word \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spirit.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Remember, both the Hebrew ruach<\/em> and Greek pneuma<\/em>, the biblical words translated \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spirit,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d mean \u00e2\u20ac\u0153wind\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153breath,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d implying a rarified material character\u00e2\u20ac\u201dlike air. And if that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the case, we are again putting the gods on the side of nature.<\/p>\n

In the same vein, some people like to say that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spirit\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is another word for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153energy.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Fine, but then it becomes perfectly clear that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153spirit\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in natural, not supernatural. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re making it tantamount to electricity or nuclear power.<\/p>\n

So what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s left on the other <\/em>side? An abstraction that is timeless, located nowhere in particular, above acting, beyond linear thought, since \u00e2\u20ac\u0153he\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is perfect with nothing only potentially done and left to do, already knowing everything and not needing to pursue a sequence of thoughts. Pure abstraction. What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the difference between that and nothing?<\/p>\n

\"If<\/a>If the personal God of scripture exists as more than a literary cipher, he is to be conceived as a being<\/em>, not as Being-itself. If he does things, he employs means. (That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just part of what it means to do things!) He is not omniscient, though (presumably) he is wise. He does not know the future because it is not there to be known. Instead, it is just that he is so clever and so powerful that, once he determines that something shall happen, he needn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t worry that anyone will be able to gainsay him. Thus he does not foreknow the future; he just builds it.<\/p>\n

Such a god is not much different from a space alien, is he? A superior being indeed, maybe even the supreme being, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s like saying that Superman is the greatest of the superheroes. The top dog. The top god. But that wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean we ought to worship him as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153God.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Even with Superman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s amazing powers, even with his tireless compassion toward us lesser mortals, it would be idolatry to worship him because, as Francis Schaeffer used to say of the Greek gods, Superman is not \u00e2\u20ac\u0153big enough.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d And neither is Jehovah. The biblical deity is more like Jack Kirby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Galactus. (And that was intentional. Kirby said he meant for the Devourer of Worlds to be his analogue to God.)<\/p>\n

Paul Tillich recognized that the God of the Bible was not adequate, so he formulated a more abstract God concept and wrote of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153God above God.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Tillich stood in a long tradition of philosophical theology, stretching back to the Stoics who redefined the embarrassingly anthropomorphic and anthropopathic Zeus of Homer and Hesiod as the all-permeating, impersonal Logos. And that is a jump from the concrete \u00e2\u20ac\u0153living God\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to a pure abstraction. You have to decide whether you can make any sense of Idealist metaphysics: does it make sense to regard abstractions like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Truth\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Eternal Forms\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as being as real or even more real than discrete objects? I cannot see how. (What, am I pretending to know better than Plato? Of course not! Compared to him, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m an orangutan. But if Aristotle could disagree with him, I guess I can, too.)<\/p>\n

To make this jump is indeed to jump outside of the natural. But is it to jump from the natural to the supernatural? No, because, whether you are talking about Zeus or Jehovah, you are talking, necessarily, about a discrete entity who pulls the strings, acts in our world (or is supposed to!). Nothing, I am suggesting, removes that being qualitatively from the same category we occupy: the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153natural.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He would differ from us merely quantitatively, like Superman or Cthulhu or Erich von D\u00d3\u201cniken\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ancient astronauts. This would be true even if this god were your creator. You might fear this kind of a god, but it would be obsequiousness to worship him, merely degrading toadying.<\/p>\n

I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see any reason to believe in such a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153natural\u00e2\u20ac\u009d god. And, as far as I can see, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no other kind. To deny that a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153supernatural\u00e2\u20ac\u009d God exists is a different kind of denial: it is not the fact that is missing, but the sense of it.<\/p>\n

So says Zarathustra.<\/p>\n


\n<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is there such a thing as the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153supernatural\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean to ask whether there is a being called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153God\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or if there are miracles. Even if God, miracles, and answered prayer are real, are they \u00e2\u20ac\u0153supernatural\u00e2\u20ac\u009d? What do we … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}