A wise person recently told me (with respect to my faith problems) that some things die when you dissect them. Obviously true. Animals, for example, die when you dissect them. And I am very open to the idea that faith might die, too, when you intellectually dissect it.
Or in another metaphor: In quantum physics (if I remember correctly) there is very roughly the problem that the properties of some things are unobservable because observation changes these properties. Observing God might be in a similar way impossible, because our way of approaching him as spectators might make him invisible.
The difficult thing is: What am I to make of these wise insights even if I were to agree with them?
I compulsively try to observe God, I obsessively dissect the arguments for and against him. How should I not? I worry about being able to believe day and night – how should I not direct my intellectual attention to that issue continuously and dissect it intellectually? In what different way (i.e. different from intellectually dissecting) could I aim at returning to belief? And how could I possibly refrain from focussing compulsively on the God issue?
Well, I think some mystics do it by having a monkey god (read: panentheism) so that they turn of expectations and work on the mind, instead.
Now, it is tricky for the theist to do this. They really have to mess with the theology– that is why mystical theists are always outcasts. Or you could become Buddhist.
Or just give up the whole venture — but then the blog would fail, wouldn’t it ! (smile)
Hey Sabio
your blogpost that you’ve linked to sure is an exciting and excitingly written post.
If I approach God I definitely have to approach him with less of a picture of him in my mind. Or more precisely: with less of a specific frame into which the picture has to fit. Or differently: I have to let him approach me rather than me approaching him.
The monkey god idea is a bit too far for me (as it also involves quite a specific picture of God).
But learning from mystics is definitely something I would be grateful to do.
** the indescribably divine is an Ineffable Nothing **
Dealing with those mystically inclined, the *I-feel-god-in-my-heart* crowd, and in general all irrationalist believers requires a different approach from dealing with rationalists.
Their usual spiel: I know that my god exists — but he/she/it cannot be described, or is beyond human understanding.
The philosopher Wittgenstein, in one seemingly cryptic utterance announced, “A nothing would be as good as a something about which nothing could be said.”
Spelled out: you claim that something exists, but no property (like, being blue) could ever be ascribed to it. This is the famous Western “via negativa” – negative path to god – also the “neti, neti” not-this, not-this of Hindu mystics. God is not blue, is not evil, is not good . . . .
Logically, however, a claim that something exists does not ascribe a property to it — or, as you ought to have learned in logic class — existence is not a predicate. (Non-existence is not a predicate either.) Nobody can talk about Nothing. True.
Nobody can talk about Nothing? Who’s doing the talking here? (Nobody?) And what’s being talked about? (Nothing?) And what did Nobody say about Nothing? Zen Buddhism figured all this out long ago — hence, koans if you’re lucky or a hard slap in the face when you’re persistently obtuse.
The sentence ‘A god exists’ seems to be saying something, but the sentence is meaningless. You might as well be saying “bar-bar” or saying nothing at all. The Viennese novelist, Robert Musil wrote a novel “The Man without Qualities.” The man who can’t be there. A nobody. Nothing.
If a god “is a something about which nothing could be said,” then this putative something is equivalent to “a nothing.”
Purported mystics in India, China, Japan, and even Europe apprehended that any *god* without qualities was a nothing.
And, they said so. Oftentimes they were obscure. But, they were right.