46 thoughts on “If Sophisticated Theologians controlled religion”

  2. All hail that esoteric abstract conception which created and sustains the existence of everything that exists except for itself! Oh Ground of Being, hallowed be thy lack of big man in the sky with a beard! Thy creative energies sustain us exactly as the godless physics would anyway! May the militant atheist be cast into mockery and personal belittling for their nihilistic and boorish tendency to go after fundamentalists by thinking they represent all religion! Truly our frail understanding is intellectual and sophisticated!

    2. “Thy creative energies sustain us exactly as the godless physics would anyway!” is great. God as a set of physics equations. I don’t think that most believers would go for that but it seems to be the direction the most sophisticated of theologians are heading.

    3. Thy creative energies sustain us exactly as the godless physics would anyway — except that they’re Love!

  4. This speaks well to a problem I have with Christianity. To a person these sophisticated theologians would admit one can be admitted to their belief systems with the thinnest of historical accounts and good feeling. But to leave the belief system requires plumbing the depths of theology and possibly several other fields well beyond what would be possible by the vast majority of non-academics. Christianity, like the roach motel, easy to get into not easy to ‘check out’. Kudos to the author for finding such a succinct way to shed light on this inanity.

    1. Christianity, like the roach motel, easy to get into not easy to ‘check out’.

      Now that is religious metephor I can appreciate.

  6. I think I recognize the knocker character in this cartoon: it’s a caricature of the guy who declined to debate with John Loftus. He also wrote a phony defense of the biblical Canaanite genocide on his web site. (He’s got a couple of deep facial wrinkles though).

  9. Well, in modest defense of the STs (while still in sympathy with the other posts), an awful lot of the Ground of Being folk believe that religion should not at all be framed in terms of “Are you Saved?” (though folks like Pope Francis who appropriate their ideas for more traditional religion are possibly more like the fellow in the cartoon!!!)

    Various religion scholars distinguish between “soteriological” religion (concern with salvation after death) and “sophiological” religion (concern with life-wisdom). While Taoism and Buddhism squarely belong in the latter category (well OK except for that pesky concern of many Asian Buddhists over not getting reincarnated as a bad animal), a lot of SophTheos reinterpret Christianity along “sophiological” lines.

    I certainly agree that trying to beat atheists over the head with “sophisticated” theology is silly, given the patently speculative & non-evidential character of it, but while “sophisticated” theology can be mocked, “sophiological” religion is certainly a step in the right direction.

    The concept of “apophatic” theology- God as mystery beyond space and matter that cannot be described in words- has been around a long time. (It was well summarized [if not explained clearly] by John Scotus Erigena when he said “We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.”) It has elements of the Buddhist notion of sunyata though Buddhists do not identify this with God.

    But more specifically, the phrase “Ground of Being” was coined by Paul Tillich who seems to have borrowed the notion from the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen tradition (where it is called āśraya) and then attempted (rather unconvincingly!!!) to identify it with the Judeo-Christian Deity.

    (Tibetan Buddhists talk of a [cosmic] Ground of Being which has openness, luminosity, and brims with compassionate energy, but they never ever refer to this as a Deity!! However, I suspect this is the actual source of Tillich’s term.)

    But Tillich never frames anything in terms of salvation or Jesus as Savior (though conservative appropriators of his ideas do), which is why the “Evangelical Dictionary of Theology” states “”At best Tillich was a pantheist, but his thought borders on atheism.”(!!)

    The serious tone of this post fails to reflect that I was highly amused by the cartoon.

    1. That soteriological and sophiological distinction is almost fascinating, but I think that was kind of the joke behind the cartoon. The recasting of God as some philosophical Theory of Everything was so obviously at odds with the popular understandings of God (at least in the US) that treating them as synonyms in this context reveals how out of touch the STs are.

      I certainly don’t think sophiological religion is any kind of step in the right direction. It sounds like using supernatural beliefs to lecture people on how to live their lives, which is kind of a big criticism atheists have towards religion in the first place, isn’t it?

      Also, I’m actually kind of surprised the “Ground of Being” term dates as far back as Tillich. I thought it was a more recent coinage. Go figure.

      1. Tillich would indeed be wholeheartedly opposed to “using supernatural beliefs to lecture people on how to live their lives”. He was a strong opponent of any kind of authoritarian religion which he described as “heteronomous” based on external authority.

        He believed that reconceiving God as “Ground of Being” was a remedy for that, but this is combined with unconvincing claims of some continuity between his views and classical Protestantism, and no explanation of what he makes of the story of Moses and the Ten Commandments or the Apocalypse, etc etc.

        One genuinely great book of Tillich’s is “Love, Power, and Justice”, a major influence on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the prime source for one of my very favorite MLK quotes “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

  10. ‘Our G.O.B.,
    who art in a parallel dimension,
    inscrutible be thy name.
    Thy Standard Model come,
    thy Physics be done,
    on earth, as it is in all space-time.
    Give us this day our daily oxidation,
    and forgive us our heat,
    Aa we have forgiven our build up of free radicals.
    And lead us not into genetic drift,
    But deliver us from the build up of junk DNA.
    For thine is the baryonic matter,
    and the dark matter, and the dark energy,
    of this corner of the Multiverse.

    ‘Ramen.

  11. Sophisticated Theology™ seems to me to be ultimately self-defeating. The more sophisticated the theology, the less reason one sees to worship the resulting “god.” If the Sophisticated Theologians™ stepped back and really looked at their argument they would realize they are talking themselves right out of religion.

    I mean, really, does a “ground state of being” care if you go to church on Sunday and sings songs to it?

  12. The Nicotine Creed

    I believe in one God Ground of all being, the Father Ground of all beingAlmighty, MakerGround of all being of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

    And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of GodGround of all being, begotten of the FatherGround of all being before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very GodGround of all being; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whomwhich all things were made.

    Who, for us men for our salvation, came down from heaven just sits there somewhere, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made manGround of all being; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shallshall continue to just sit there, somewhere and have no end.

    And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of LifeGround of all being; who proceeds from the Father [and the Son]; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.

    And I believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

    Doesn’t quite work does it?

    2. Interesting choice of metaphor, given the topic. Being theologically unsophisticated, I’m having a little trouble visualising a nailed ground of being.

  15. Could Ground Of Being make an ineffable transcendent perfection so heavy even He couldn’t lift it?

  16. I once asked a proponent of the Impenetrable Ground State version of God to help me understand his views by doing a small thought experiment:

    Consider two hypothetical universes. One of them has a Ground of Being. The other one does NOT have a Ground of Being. What are some of the differences you’d expect to find between the two?

    As I recall, he didn’t answer the question. That is, he instead tried to explain why my hypothetical was unanswerable because it diminishes God and thus wasn’t a legitimate question. Apparently God is diminished every time you try to understand it or analyze it or make any sense of it. But accepting it under those terms — that’s fine.

    I suspect that any attempt to answer such a question diminishes the believer, not the hypothetical God. It treats them like a human being and holds them accountable. As always, they think they can borrow traits from God. If God is infallible, they are infallible. If God is inscrutable and hard to understand, then THEY get to be inscrutable and hard to understand — and get props for it too.

    1. I’ve tried the same methods before, with much the same results. But your last paragraph is scarily true. What they can do when they really think Gob is on their side, and what they deem Gob wants from them and others. Can’t be understood or scrutinized? Scary.

    2. Sastra,

      I believe the standard response to your thought experiment, at least among some portion of “sophisticated believers” (e.g.
      Thomistic-Aristotelians) would be to claim
      there is no reason to try to describe a universe absent of God. That’s a (metaphysical) impossibility, which is why they arrived at the whole “ground of being” thing in the first place.

      (I’m leaving out some caveats, but close enough…)

      BTW, one of the main problems I find in probing metaphysical arguments, and arguments such as those of Aquinas, is that
      the premises have to come from somewhere to be acknowledged as “true.” Inevitably the premises come from our experience. But then you have to vet the truth of that experience.
      Once this is on the table it leads out toward the type of empirical vetting we use elsewhere, science being our most rigorous expression. To the metaphysical arguments that want to be cut off from, or “pre-empirical” and “necessary” just can’t isolate themselves in the way they want to.

      (That’s not to say I think empiricism is just viciously self-justifying and relies on no assumptions or axioms to get it off the ground, but when you travel out from those assumptions they remain consistent with the rest of your empirical approach, whereas the assumptions used for theism hit special pleading pretty soon).

      1. I agree and you expressed it well. It also parallels my experience.

        The hypothetical is unanswerable because it diminishes the idea of God, in that it forces the concept out of the area of Unquestionable Metaphysical Premises (existence of anything entails the existence of God) and into the area of empirical conclusion, where we’re not just allowed to reason from evidence but required to.

        When I was a kid we used to use an expression which always worked to our benefit: “You can’t touch me — I’m on gool (sp?)” “Gool” (which was possibly a local corruption of ‘goal’)was both fluid and respected. It meant “safe space.”

        Anything could be Gool. It only had to be named. A tree, a building, a room, a mother’s pantleg. Once you were on Gool, you were automatically free. Gool usually didn’t need any prior consensus. The other kids could and did dispute whether something was or was not Gool — but adamant repetition and continued insistence was usually enough. Okay, fine, you’re on Gool. You’re not It.

        I think of “metaphysics” as being like Gool. Yes, there is a legitimate philosophical meaning of the term and rational limits to what does and doesn’t qualify. But theologians and o my gawd the general public apparently think it is Gool and they use it that way. Call something “metaphysical” (or — shudder — “spiritual”)and you’re safe. Safe from criticism, safe from debate, and above all safe from having to be clear, consistent, or careful. I’ve even been told that homeopathy is “metaphysical” and they watch in horror when this doesn’t promptly end all discussion. But it’s Gool!!! Didn’t you hear?

        Metaphysics means never having to say you’re sorry.

        1. Heh, “The Gool Of Existence.” “The Gool of All Being” 🙂

          Edward Feser wrote a blog post a while back declaring that Christian Apologetics had to return to the rigor and grounding of scholasticism. Skeptics had real questions that had to be answered, and so the Christian should be ready with a system from the ground up, but that as Christians they also had to defend Christianity, which meant going beyond defending the philosopher God to ground specific Christian revelation as well. He’s a smart guy and knows the challenges in doing so. He knew he couldn’t go straight from the First Cause God to Jesus. But he made some brief stabs in the direction, claiming that the arguments for God’s existence arise at certain characteristics that raise the probability of
          a resurrection miracle and revelation.

          I spent a long time debating that with his crowd on his blog. It’s wishful thinking.
          The problem is, as you recognize, and as I argued there, that even IF you accept the First Cause God, the epistemological necessity of empirical thinking gets off the ground immediately afterward. If God ultimately grounds scientific thinking, then you’ve got to accept that such thinking is the most rigorous and careful way to vet any empirical claim, including resurrections.
          And Jesus’ Resurrection falls so laughably short of the level of evidence we demand anywhere else for extraordinary (or even ordinary) empirical claims, it’s an unbridgeable gulf. You ain’t getting to there from your First Cause.

          Feser’s suggestions that the First Cause God can be used to raise probabilities of Christianity were pretty half-hearted. As I remember, he actually acknowledged the whole resurrection defense things wasn’t his area of specialty and that he’d punt to evidentialists like W.L.Craig for that part.
          Which shows you just how little hope there is for that project of defending Christianity! Whether you start from First Cause or not, you get to the same old, same old apologetics stuff for “eyewitnesses to the Resurrection!”

        2. While I’m blathering that, and having brought up W.L. Craig, it reminded me of another issue. Apologists like Craig like to argue that the atheists appeal to “Dead people just don’t resurrect” is appealing to a question-begging assumption that doesn’t really address their argument. “We aren’t saying a man rose by NATURAL forces, that of course goes against what we know of Nature. Rather, it’s our claim Jesus rose SUPERNATURALLY. So probabilities appealing to empirical naturalism are a red-herring. It really boils down to whether you think there is a Supernatural Force – God – that exists, capable of such phenomena. Which is why we appeal to other philosophical arguments. By establishing a God/First Cause exists, we establish miracles are possible, raising the possibilities for the Resurrection.”

          But of course that’s nonsense. First of all, an atheist isn’t committed to assuming there is no supernatural, or a God. I am happy to say “sure…could be!” Just as I’m happy to say all manner of other logical possibilities may be true. The problem is “On what grounds do we decide a miracle has occurred?” It’s a question in which you simply can’t ignore all the confounding factors – human bias, human error, human bullshitting, the countless false positives and alternate explanations – which lead to the rigors of science in the first place.
          Granting a First Cause doesn’t lower the empirical bar one iota for any special miracle claims over any other miracle claim, over any NATURAL empirical claim.

          The other thing is that adding the assumption “there is a God capable of miracles” adds NOTHING to the empirical project of understanding everyday probabilities. The phenomenology of our experience isn’t altered – we still have no choice but to infer our concept of reality from “how things seem to operate.”

          If things have always “fallen down” when you drop them from a building roof, you can infer this is the nature of the physical forces involved. Adding a God does nothing to alter the probabilities because even with the gratuitous God in the background your every experiment showing “things drop to the ground” would be testing the nature of GOD just as much as you would be testing the nature of lone blind forces. If probabilistic/empirical reasoning is valid at all, you have to say just as strongly “it’s God’s nature to cause or allow things to fall to the ground.” That becomes your operating rule unless you find empirical exceptions JUST as if you were reasoning without God in the mix.

          We are just as justified applying our empirical inferences to people resurrecting from the dead. If a First Cause God exists, all inferences point to it being His NATURE to leave people dead, to act in ways utterly consistent with the “blind forces” of entropy, biological decomposition etc, as described scientifically. The probabilities of any supernatural miracle aren’t raise at all by the gratuitous inclusion of a God to our empirical inferences.

          Ok…got that out of my system…

          1. Just when you thought you were out of the System, the System comes back …

            I think you’re mistaken here. I don’t agree that probabilities carry the same weight in a model of the world which assumes magic as a basic force as they do in a model of the world which was built up on only observation, evidence, and probability. You’ve now conceded an entire supernatural category which is no longer empty or hypothetical, but primary and important. It seems to me that once this is granted (even for the sake of argument) all bets are now off on where to draw the line on which miracles are likely and which miracles are not.

            It’s sort of like agreeing in the existence of psychic powers, but going after psychic after psychic for employing cold reading techniques. Ah — but when you weren’t looking — THAT one was real. It’s an endless game of Whack-a-Mole and why wouldn’t it be? The rules changed critically as soon as we all agreed that okay, sure — ESP is a real phenomenon used by real psychics. It’s just that we have a particular problem with yours.

            Why place atheism on the same ground as religion?

            I once was in a debate with a Catholic who was defending the reliability of science in a world view which held that God could, at any point, intervene in nature and thus theoretically contravene the result of any experiment. Ah, but you see, God follows rules! He only performs miracles rarely and for one purpose: God will only send a miracle when it is necessary to increase a person’s faith. So you see, He would never intervene in a science experiment.

            What — because scientists aren’t people, too?

            And there’s the rub with trying to reign in the supernatural by invoking the regularities of the natural world. The supernatural, being Purely Mental, is used for explaining a story. It can therefore focus on anything and be invoked at will. All that’s required is that it makes a point … against atheism. Uh oh.

            So I think it’s a mistake for an atheist to concede even the First Cause God in hopes of fastening on weaker prey (though I admit that the Christian religion is a tempting target.) Put Mind above and/or prior to Matter and any supernatural belief is not just as unlikely as any other but as possible as any other. Now let the believer pick and choose as they will. And they will.

          2. Sastra,

            But the very problems you raise regarding invoking the supernatural are still problems even granting the supernatural. Granting the possibility of the supernatural doesn’t grant a get-out-of-argument-free card at all.
            It’s simple to argue how the very problems you invoke ARE STILL PROBLEMS. If a God exists, I’m STILL going to have a problem being empirically consistent if I invoke Him to explain my missing car keys. We would STILL have to have a way to reign in all the logical possibilities of God’s intervention, and have some criteria for deciding when it is justified to believe God did a miracle or not. A theist will have to ask exactly what I as an atheist would ask “Ok, IF a miracle happened…how would I know?” This immediately gets into finding some criteria for justifying our empirical beliefs, that X phenomena does or doesn’t occur, or did or didn’t occur. And the empirical logic will of necessity be the same for the theist (if he is to be consistent) as for the atheist.

            An All Powerful God is really just a stand in for the very realm of LOGICAL POSSIBILITY that empirical thinking already is formed to
            deal with. We don’t know with absolute certainty the nature of reality, so we have to always acknowledge in any event “we could be wrong” which is to keep the door open to the realm of the Logically Possible. Fire burned my fingers yesterday, but it’s logically possible placing my finger over the flame on my stove will freeze them tomorrow. We have already acknowledged the realm of the logically possible – inherent in the God concept – in our very method of finding our way THROUGH the landscape of the logically possible, via empirical reasoning, where we say “Ok, we have to go on what is plausible, and we do that by inferring probabilities about the nature of our experience from our previous experience, with the proviso we could be wrong. But how will we justify changing our belief? Enter the cannons of empirical reasoning.

            So, again, I still say that even granting a first cause God for the sake of argument doesn’t help raise the probabilities of any particular miracle at all, if one is being consistent empirically. With God ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE but that is only a stand in concept for the acknowledge space of the LOGICALLY POSSIBLE already taken into account by empirical methods of winnowing out competing claims.

          3. I think I understand your point, but still disagree. If God’s existence is actually granted the possibilities change as a practical matter, if nothing else. I agree that yes indeed, the theist still has a problem finding their way through the landscape of the logically possible — but they’ve now been given a light which they can flash in any direction. Their claims have taken on a plausibility they didn’t have before.

            It seems to me that there’s an important distinction between granting God as a logical possibility (which I gladly do) and granting the existence of God. One assumes nothing else changes, because they live in the same world we do and see the same things we do.

            But, at the risk of dragging Halloween into November, I raise the grim and ghastly specter of The Differing World Views Argument, wherein two people look at the same evidence from different starting points and … aargh! Zombies are eating my braaaaiiiinnn!

            Don’t feed them after midnight, Vaal. Never feed them after midnight.

          4. Sastra,

            Fun discussion, thanks.

            “If God’s existence is actually granted the possibilities change as a practical matter, if nothing else.”

            I would argue that’s not the case, that it’s a sort of illusion that seems intuitive, but which doesn’t actually work when you start having to apply it to any *specific* empirical claim, miraculous or otherwise.

            If I claim that the remission of my surviving cancer is a miracle from God, the question remains either way: How would I know that? How do I justify the belief that THIS is a case of the miraculous? I’ll have to answer all the same questions: is it because you prayed? Well if prayer is efficacious in that way, how do you explain all the unanswered prayers? How do you winnow this from your likely tendency toward biased inferences? What’s your hypothesis?
            How can we test it?

            It would be subject to all the strictures of inquiry and justification as any other empirical claim, or hypothesis. Empirical reasoning simply demands this consistency because epistemological absurdity follows when you start special pleading for your particular miracle.

            Empirical reasoning assumes the logically possible – that’s why we are always open to being shown wrong, and able to adapt to new experience and evidence.
            “I can’t rule it out with absolute certainty so I’ll believe it if you show me good evidence, but until then I’ve inferred the nature of X from how it has behaved all the times in previous experience.” It’s the only way.

            “Their claims have taken on a plausibility they didn’t have before.”,

            But no *particular* claim takes no any greater plausibility because plausibility generally rests upon our inferences of probability. It’s empirically possible I’ll win the next 10 lotteries in a row. But it’s not plausible given the low probability we assign it based on inference and calculations on how things *seem to work* in our experience.

            William L. Craig isn’t going to join me in jumping off the top of a building, on the view that positing a First Cause God has raised the probabilities that He will intervene and have us float gently to the ground. Why not? Because, First Cause God or not, his notion of such probabilities has been formed, as it must, on probabilities derived from all the past experience of “entities subject to gravity.”

            Gotta go.

    3. The answer I’ve got from those who play the “sustainer” card is that the universe without the sustainer would lapse into nothingness. That’s a charitable interpretation of most versions, and it is also seriously antiscientific to boot. (Conservation laws, once again, make this wrongheaded.)

      1. It also begs the question. It’s like asking someone who believes the moon is made out of cheese what would it take to convince them that it’s NOT made out of cheese — and getting the answer “if the moon wasn’t there.” Cheese-Moon and Sustained-by-God_Universe have slyly been blended into a single concept which now can’t be challenged without an internal contradiction..

  17. Ground state, wow!

    That can only imply that each and every one of those 2.47 petaHz photons we see in our Hubble satellite photos represents the hallelujah of a teeny tiny hydrogen ion’s epiphany…

    1. Oops, I guess I got excited for a moment there, which only brings me farther away from my own ground state and closer to… could it be?

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