Can I be completely honest with myself and still be a Christian?
Maybe. Maybe not. I'm willing to see.
For a starter, I have to establish this first logical conclusion below:
Let's face it. Nothing in this world shows us that there is a God. You can go outside, look at the sun, moon, and stars - and the trees, rocks and streams - nothing objectively allows one person to point and another person to see and say, "Ah, yes. There is a personality like mine but that is all-powerful. And He (She? It?) must be the maker of all this."
Because there IS a "thing", does not neccessarily mean some other "thing" made that thing. Some things just exist. And they change and move and alter chemical make-ups or are born and die and move through time.
I pick up a rock. Nobody made it. It just is. It came from other rocks that came from molten chemicals maybe from some other day and age from way back. Or maybe not. But wind and rain and myself and animals and pressure and dirt and air and other things have changed this rock from who knows how long back? I can't tell. But because this rock exists, I can not justifiably build a mental construction of a divine being that sits above me making these kinds of things. I mean I can construe this, but in all honesty that's not a fair conjecture. It's a conjecture of choice and more fairly, a conjecture of imagination and will. Or even faith.
So, (in contrast to what intelligent design advocates say) one cannot step out into the world and point and say to someone else "See. God exists." and logically and necessarily expect agreement.
[I am purposely using a semiotic triangle of pointing and communicating between two people in an intersubjective manner ala Walker Percy to avoid the purely subjective conclusion-making inferences that anyone can make about most anything to oneself. We're trying to stay in the realm of the rational and communicable]
Let's face it. This is the truth.
The opposite also is true.
You cannot step out into the world and point and see and say, "See. There is no God."
The world itself is a big floating rock ...with growth and life and chemical reactions and things happening upon it over time. We are people upon this rock. We are aware of ourselves. We are aware we came from somewhere or something or someone. We do not know for sure what or where or who that someone or something is. We do not even know for sure that there is a someone or something out there. We may just be chemical processes that have gelled together and formed some sort of awareness and self-awareness as an anomaly to this bio-chemical world of animals and plants and growth and cycles of events that can occur upon a rock floating in space over time.
We really don't know and we really can't tell by standing up and looking around and trying to find the obvious.
It is not obvious.
Let's face it.
It is not obvious.
We do not know.
From this angle, starting from and with ourselves and our senses and the obvious world around us, it is not obvious where or how we came to be here. We do not know that there is a being with consciousness, and knowledge and forethought and creation-ability power that has made us who and what we are as beings and placed us upon this rock planet that we who speak English call earth.
It's just not obvious.
This is a big hurdle for me and a major stopping and starting point that I have to swallow hard several times before I can keep it down.
I'm still swallowing it ... so give me some time. But I am convinced that any intelligent, thoughtful, honest person has to agree with me on this point.
Any nay-sayers? If not then, I'll go on....
For a starter, I have to establish this first logical conclusion below:
Let's face it. Nothing in this world shows us that there is a God. You can go outside, look at the sun, moon, and stars - and the trees, rocks and streams - nothing objectively allows one person to point and another person to see and say, "Ah, yes. There is a personality like mine but that is all-powerful. And He (She? It?) must be the maker of all this."
Because there IS a "thing", does not neccessarily mean some other "thing" made that thing. Some things just exist. And they change and move and alter chemical make-ups or are born and die and move through time.
I pick up a rock. Nobody made it. It just is. It came from other rocks that came from molten chemicals maybe from some other day and age from way back. Or maybe not. But wind and rain and myself and animals and pressure and dirt and air and other things have changed this rock from who knows how long back? I can't tell. But because this rock exists, I can not justifiably build a mental construction of a divine being that sits above me making these kinds of things. I mean I can construe this, but in all honesty that's not a fair conjecture. It's a conjecture of choice and more fairly, a conjecture of imagination and will. Or even faith.
So, (in contrast to what intelligent design advocates say) one cannot step out into the world and point and say to someone else "See. God exists." and logically and necessarily expect agreement.
[I am purposely using a semiotic triangle of pointing and communicating between two people in an intersubjective manner ala Walker Percy to avoid the purely subjective conclusion-making inferences that anyone can make about most anything to oneself. We're trying to stay in the realm of the rational and communicable]
Let's face it. This is the truth.
The opposite also is true.
You cannot step out into the world and point and see and say, "See. There is no God."
The world itself is a big floating rock ...with growth and life and chemical reactions and things happening upon it over time. We are people upon this rock. We are aware of ourselves. We are aware we came from somewhere or something or someone. We do not know for sure what or where or who that someone or something is. We do not even know for sure that there is a someone or something out there. We may just be chemical processes that have gelled together and formed some sort of awareness and self-awareness as an anomaly to this bio-chemical world of animals and plants and growth and cycles of events that can occur upon a rock floating in space over time.
We really don't know and we really can't tell by standing up and looking around and trying to find the obvious.
It is not obvious.
Let's face it.
It is not obvious.
We do not know.
From this angle, starting from and with ourselves and our senses and the obvious world around us, it is not obvious where or how we came to be here. We do not know that there is a being with consciousness, and knowledge and forethought and creation-ability power that has made us who and what we are as beings and placed us upon this rock planet that we who speak English call earth.
It's just not obvious.
This is a big hurdle for me and a major stopping and starting point that I have to swallow hard several times before I can keep it down.
I'm still swallowing it ... so give me some time. But I am convinced that any intelligent, thoughtful, honest person has to agree with me on this point.
Any nay-sayers? If not then, I'll go on....
2 Comments:
Er, yes with the caveat that once you start saying things like "obvious world," I think you're relying on language, perception, culture, observations, etc. and finding a shared agreement on that can be difficult, if not impossible. When we move beyond the five senses or the natural world into discussions of shared awareness, I think you start to have to rely on some shared assumptions.
In other words, you say nothing in this world shows us there is/is not a God, but, at the same time, you indicate some "experience" of having self-awareness and general awareness and that this awareness is filtered through language. That seems like a big leap from the natural senses. Some would argue that this "experience" would lead you to believe that there is something other than chemical/natural processes and that this investigation of the something other might lead you to God. Of course, others argue that it's all just chemicals and language is a function with several left-over parts.
So, yes, agreed. At the very least it is not obvious to the five senses that there is a God and even the knowledge of one's own self doesn't directly point to a God since it could be explained by a sort of trick (Rorty being the primary mover on these suppositions) of language and nuerons. I just want the caveat that "knowledge of self" is a big, soupy mess of a statement.
Then we agree.
It is obvious that God is not obvious.
(But to slightly digress and explain further...)
By using obvious I mean that which is right in front of you - in the way. I mean to reach a primary state, common and unavoidable. God himself does not make him(her/it)self apparent. God is not obviously there or not there.
To avoid the language, perceptions, culture, pre-conceived mind constructs is difficult to do but possible for an honest person.
Picture yourself waking up on a desert island with amnesia. You don't know exactly where you are or how you got there.
The human race is in this exact predicament.
Forget culture, perceptions, language, history, writing and even speech. Consider only you and I standing shoulder to shoulder. I point at something and you see it and we both know that we both see it.
[now after this, when i give it a name and you agree/disagree to that name we have entered some other arena, and yes some say this mystery of language itself points to an existence of a God and at least to the fact that humans are qualitatively different that animals. i agree to the later point at least. but i'm not that smart to reason all this out and come to a life commitment that there is or isn't a God from this study.]
From this shoulder to shoulder stance, God (a creator, a supreme entity, a father-like personality, a Holy Ghost if you will, an all-powerful 'other') is not obvious.
My mother, if she was standing right there, would be obvious. A deer in the woods (I can see it, but you can't because of a tree in the way or because of the deer's natural ability to blend into the background - but then you look again and then you see it) would be obvious - a building, a tree, the sun, the road... these things can be obvious. (at a given point in time, beyond language, beyond thought, beyond reasoning, we can both be there and in simple primitive terms, both know that this thing IS THERE. it is obvious.)
God is not obvious.
The logical extension of this is that if we extend our abilities to our five senses, we are still only extending what can or cannot be observed - the obvious. (pause on the needs of interpretations for now... that goes into the realms of knowledge and transferrable information over time. don't go there yet... its a distraction for now, but transferrable knowledge is the next thing we'll look at.)
These extensions of ourselves are microscopes, telescopes, and instrumentations that extend our abilities to see, hear, smell, taste, touch things beyond our normal genetically endowed ranges.
Dogs hear sounds in the higher end of the sound spectrum than we hear. Elephants hear sound in lower ranges beyond what we hear. Birds and bats and whales and hosts of other organisms see and hear and taste and touch other aspects of things in this world that we are not able to sense ourselves without extensions of ourselves (i.e. instrumentation, tools, scientific intruments that can pick up sounds and sights beyond what our natural senses do.)
These things of the world are obvious to these animals.
They are not obvious to us.
But if we extend what can be obvious to us by intrumentation, they then CAN be obvious to us.
But, though these other things in the universe become observable to us, one thing we find - God, even with our senses extended, is NOT observable.
Even with science, we do not find that God is obvious.
All this to say that even when we extend our senses, we still do not find that God is or isn't. He is not obvious. We cannot (so far at least) see him with a telescope, hear him with ultra-sound listening devices, find him in an electronic microscope, nor pick him up over radio-waves.
Even with our senses extended, we do not find that God is obvious, observable or able to be clearly shown by pointing. :)
Using "tools that extend" as a definition of science itself, i must conclude (that at least so far) science does not make God obvious.
But on the other hand, science does not show that there is not a God. It only extends our abilities to see, hear, and observe. And of course, since it has not found God, it doesn't mean that God is not out there. It just means that he(she/it) is not obvious.
God is not obvious - with or without science.
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