This was originally a draft of something intended to be shown to people I ran across online who might want to help me with my intellectual project. But it's also addressed to anyone who reads it.
Hello,
I have been working on a philosophical project to prove the existence of God (more or less the God of Christianity -- more on that later). I've been interested in the question of whether God existed since I was 19, and now I'm 35 (as of writing this, in July 2023), so about 16 years. I've been working on this specific project for about 10 years, more intensely in the last four years. But now, I realize that I could use other people's help. I now feel that I have traced out at least the scope of my project which I currently intend not to expand too much. So I think it makes more sense to look for feedback at this time, when I didn't in the past.
I am more of a DIY thinker instead of a reader. I have read some influences, like Berkeley and Buber, and I've taken a few ideas from reading other philosophers, but I would say I'm not well-read. The upside of this approach is that maybe I will be able to see the big picture without being bogged down in details, and I may be able to be more original. The downside is that I may unknowingly argue for things that have been disproved, and also express myself in a way that is idiosyncratic and thus hard to understand.
Anyone who argues for something has the weakness of tending to not see all its flaws. But someone who wants to argue against it will search for its flaws.
(Anyone could be helpful, but someone who is better-read could be especially helpful. Also someone who is skeptical but interested.)
What am I trying to accomplish with this project? My original motivation was to satisfy myself that God existed. Another early motivation was to show atheists that God exists (I was raised, and still consider myself to be, a Christian). Many people probably have had these motivations and concluded that "there is something other than reason that shows that God exists" (something fideist or quasi-fideist like Reformed epistemology) or were satisfied by historical, design, or cosmological arguments that the God of Christianity exists. I was generally not satisfied with any of those.
It appears that atheists also aren't satisfied with those arguments. Many people starting out with apologetic motivations might conclude that atheists just don't want to believe in God and there's nothing you can do about it. But I never liked that -- I preferred to believe that we just didn't have good-enough apologetics, no matter how much they satisfied us. I do think that atheists can be just as fideistic / irrationally biased in their atheism as Christians -- but I don't think all atheists are all the time, and so it makes sense to try to make a rational case to them that God exists.
As I went along, I acquired other motivations. One is to make the case to the secular elite (those who design and implement this-worldly governance broadly construed) to protect theistic or possibly even specifically Christian values as they go about forming and implementing future governance. Developments like AI raise the possibility that we are living in a particularly decisive era of history -- when AI becomes sufficiently powerful, it will stress the existing political order, concentrating power in the hands of whoever controls the AI (hopefully the AI is controllable...) or in the hands of the AI itself (hopefully it has been trained well...)
The people I know of who care about, and are at least somewhat positioned to do something about, the threat of AI are the effective altruists and "Bay Area rationalists" and I do think that they would have to take seriously a rational argument for the existence of God if it bore some relevance to their process -- or they would have to deny their own founding motivations of "doing the most good" (EAs) or "being rational" (rationalists). I see them as people who tend to happen to be atheists, but who care about something else more than anti-theism (generally, working for the well-being of the world), and they have a track record of believing weird new beliefs just because those beliefs are rational and are relevant to advancing the well-being of the world.
I think the EAs/rationalists, just because their thinking is far-reaching, and they care about the future, will have disproportionate effect on whatever new order emerges, and I would want them to take seriously either that God does exist (ideal outcome) or that there is a sufficiently high percent likelihood that God exists that they have to protect some theistic (/ Christian) values in the government of the future. I am particularly concerned that there might be a kind of spiritually harmful future and without some kind of transcendent definition to what is right or wrong, the EA/rationalist/etc. future-designers won't be able to resist it -- they don't have a solid intellectual foundation to keep them from going there, or from being able to firmly resist the cultural drift that has already partially sent us that way. (Something like a Brave New World future.)
This brings me to another later motivation. Ten years ago, I discovered a set of Biblical doctrines called the New Wine System. Basically, the New Wine System (as I now understand it) says that 1) we must all become completely holy (repent of all sins, stop sinning, love God completely, and other things like that) before we can enter heaven, and 2) there will be a finite afterlife longer than this one in which we can finish this process. These two simple statements, if believed in, could change the church, providing a stronger reason for people to become holy, and the knock-on effect of that would be things like: less abuse, people loving each other more, more motivation to further the kingdom of heaven, and maybe other things like that. (The statements also imply that those who have not accepted Jesus before they die have a chance to hear the gospel.)
So, when we prove the existence of God, the moves that we make cause us to commit to a particular worldview, and I wanted to prove the existence of God such that the New Wine System was integrated into the resulting worldview.
Another later motivation was to prove the existence of a God who was still Biblical or compatible with the Bible, but not the same as the existing images of God, and to show that this God was someone whom we should care about, and in a sense care for. There are multiple drifts to our culture, one of which is this idea that we must care about and for more beings, more intensely. Eventually, this could lead people to care about God and try to obey him.
Obviously, all of these things are only good if they are true. But, I hope they sound like things that make it seem like it's worth the effort to criticize and defend them, to not reject this possibility unless we are sure that it doesn't obtain.
So how do I go about trying to do all these things?
I use a multi-stage argument, called "MSLN" for its four components.
An atheist begins their way through the argument with "M", the "Metaphysical Organism". Imagine an organism made out of pure consciousness. It is connected to all other consciousnesses. The way that consciousnesses connect is by experiencing exactly what other consciousnesses experience. So this organism is radically empathetic with all other beings. It experiences their pain exactly as they do. It can't bear pain forever and so will get rid of it (or I could be more technical and say it can't bear unbearable pain forever). Anything that we do that pains it will have to cease. If we as people pain it, we will have to cease, or cease paining it by changing.
Is it a person? Certainly in a rudimentary way it is (it acts on its own consciousness). Also, it is aware of exactly what it's like to be a human, and so knows what personhood is like.
This being probably values us, because it endures unending suffering by keeping us alive though we suffer, in our world where there is always unbearable suffering going on somewhere. If it values us enough to keep us alive now, it probably wants to keep us alive indefinitely. It probably wants to give us an adequate opportunity (a finite but long time) to come into tune with it (come to be people who turn against "sin", that which causes it unbearable suffering). That way we can live with it, when all unbearable suffering has ceased for both us and it. So we have the two basic ideas of the New Wine System (we must become holy / come into tune with, God / a God-like being before entering heaven / living indefinitely, and there is a time for us to complete this process after death).
Now, why should an atheist believe that such a being exists? We need an argument for why everything is consciousness. (I think one might be formulated, see appendix.) But then, an atheist could say "well, why should there be one empathetic being? Why not a multitude of consciousnesses in some kind of community or ecosystem, etc.?" This is where I want to end the "Metaphysical Organism" argument, with this kind of invisible being that might exist, not with a God who certainly does. This is the part that I think the EAs/rationalists might most widely accept, and that wide acceptance should be enough (hopefully) for them to "write in" protections for theistic (New Wine, perhaps specifically Biblical) values into the government of the future. The being that only might exist, but whose possibility of existing is firm enough, still moves policy in the EA/rationalist world.
An atheist who soaks in the thought that everything is consciousness should eventually think that there is no prejudice against what goes on in the mind. What we know with our five senses is added to with what we know "noetically" (I get this term from Plantinga/Alston's "noetic perception" idea) and "imaginally" (what we can picture in our imaginations). Instead of saying that thoughts, beliefs, and imaginations are fake things merely in our heads, I think it's natural to assume that they are real things external to us. Now, their reality may not be trustworthy in ways that some sensory things are (the imagination of a fire does not keep us from dying of hypothermia), but they are a real part of the world.
If they are, then the parts of the world are exactly as presented to us. In Berkeleian terms, perceptual objects are not just sights, sounds, touch perceptions, tastes, and smells, but also whatever ideas we have of them -- we perceive the sunset as beautiful, and the perceptual object of the sunset that we directly perceive actually is beautiful, the beauty is part of it. (The sunset as a more universal thing, which other people can see, is a different story.) There is a motive force that makes the sunset be what it is -- it doesn't make itself. This motive force must be a "mind" in Berkeleian terms, because, if everything is consciousness, the only things that can act are conscious beings. This motive force / mind knows us well enough to form the perceptual objects that we see with the meaning built into them that we would see. This I term "speaking" things to us, as though they are "words".
We can perceive thoughts "being thoughts" (behaving (or being moved as though they behave) according to their nature as thoughts) and the way that thoughts work is a structure, inherently part of reality. Concepts are as solidly real as physical girders. Just like girders, they have their "physics". So, we see that thoughts, if they are really referring to something, are connected to that thing in some way, and if they do connect, since everything is consciousness, it must be by conscious perception. Concepts may be persons, or they may be the contents of a person's mind. The "speaker" of a concept can speak a concept that is only an idea to us, being able to perceive and thus connect to all the things the concept does. (The concept that is an idea connects to its referents through its speaker.)
The "speaker" who speaks our entire universe to us must be conscious of the entire universe. And, it could choose not to speak specific things to us, and thus they would have no effect on us. So this "Speaker" (the "S" in "MSLN") has the power of God.
The Speaker, because it contacts everything, is conscious of everything and empathetic with everything. So it is a "Metaphysical Organism".
How many Speakers can there be? Only one. (Basically, if two beings perceive everything, they perceive the same things, and to perceive exactly the same things is to be the same person. See appendix for more information.)
So now the person who began the journey as an atheist has adopted a more in-focus belief in the New Wine, empathetic God (i.e., their credence that such a God exists has gone up, perhaps close enough to 100% for them to become theists).
Nothing so far would commit this journeyer to believe the Bible or be a Christian. I can imagine people with biases against Christianity stopping at this point.
But, spending time in the worldview that the imaginal and noetic are as real as the sensory, and that they have a kind of "physics", might cause this journeyer to consider "ought". "Ought" is no longer an epiphenomenon (or the like) of material brains in a real material world, but rather a fundamental part of reality.
Can a thing exist if in no way it ought to exist? I don't think so. So then, to be is to ought to be. That things ought to be is their reason for existence. Legitimacy (ought itself) connects to all the individual oughts, validating them. Legitimacy must be made of consciousness, like all things, and thus is mind (it validates, so it is active). Legitimacy can exclude things from existence by no longer validating them. Legitimacy connects to all things and is thus conscious of all things. So, like the Speaker, Legitimacy has the sensitivity and power of God, and is a person.
Is it legitimate for Legitimacy to not be legitimate? No. If Legitimacy is not legitimate, it ceases to exist and thus everything ceases to exist. In order for a being to be legitimate, it must put Legitimacy (ought, the good) first, above anything else, including its own well-being. Legitimacy itself must do this, if possible. Legitimacy must also submit itself to the burdens it lays on those it causes to exist. By being radically empathetic, it carries all burdens. But it does so knowing everything. We live our lives not knowing, dying without the certain knowledge of an afterlife, riddled with doubt and ignorance. So if possible, God must live that life too. It is possible if there is more than one person in God, one who is Speaker and the "grand" part of Legitimacy connecting to all other beings, the other who can take on the form of a finite individual being and suffer and die like a finite individual being -- also part of Legitimacy. These two persons must create everything else together. The finite one must go through with the finite life and death at some point, if possible, in order to be willing, and thus confirm his/her legitimacy and thus Legitimacy itself -- if he/she turns away, everything ceases to exist.
(One can see "Father" and "Son" in the above, but what about the "Spirit"? My current thought is that the Spirit emerges whenever the Father and a finite being overlap -- the overlapping part is a third person who is both the other beings and itself. All these overlapping parts are connected to each other through the Father who is conscious of them all and is part of them all. So they make one "Spirit", the spirit of the Father.)
Now, this by itself does not say "the Bible is true", but it is suggestive of the New Testament. Is it possible that Jesus is the one who died (among other goals:) to confirm the legitimacy of God (of Legitimacy?) A person might think so. Some people might not, and would stop at "M" + "S" + "L" ("MSL"), the purely natural-theological part of the journey.
(This is where the philosophical project stops, as far as I am asking anyone to give me feedback on right now.)
But some would continue on to "N" (New Wine Biblical Christianity). They would do so perhaps because they were trying to obey God and searching for ways to do so, and saw the Bible as having some credence as being the word of God, since it sounds like MSL. (Maybe other scriptures also sound like MSL?). They might obey the Bible's commands to prefer, act, and trust in specific ways.
But, once we have become theists, we can listen to God directly, and, if our relationship with him permits this, we may be granted instructions on what to believe. Also, as we get to know God better, we might realize that certain things come from his voice, perhaps including all or part of the Bible. So our intellectual and fiducial consciences might recommend that we as individuals commit more deeply to the Bible than would be warranted by public reason.
--
So, if that sounds like a project that is worth pursuing, what would you do?
If anything I've said above as I've described my project seems insufficiently well-argued, write down the problems you see. Also, my blog Formulalessness has my notes on these topics. It has posts that are not as related, but many of the ones that are related can be found through this one. (I also have notes I haven't posted, which I may post at some point.) My blog may both raise problems and answer them. As you discover problems (or if you think of solutions), check here for instructions on what to do.
--
Appendix:
Here is my most recent argument for why everything is conscious experience.
How many Speakers can there be? I decided to split this off into a separate post.
No comments:
Post a Comment