David challenged me to justify why my prior belief in God should be any
different from my prior belief in the Tooth Fairy.
Let's hearken back to the point Jonathan made what seems like such a long
time ago. We are never in complete ignorance. We are not talking about
two arbitrary interchangeable labels here. We start with some knowledge.
For example:
1. How many people have risked the lives of themselves and their loved
ones for the tooth fairy?
2. How many symphonies have been composed for the tooth fairy?
3. How many people have retired to a safe place away from an unbelieving
society that punished them for being different, in order to have
unpressured time to learn the difficult skill of experiencing communion
with the tooth fairy?
It is extreme hubris to imagine that we can safely throw away the
accumulated wisdom of humanity when setting our priors. The accumulated
wisdom of humanity is a form of knowledge. If we ignore it, our learning
will be highly inefficient. One could make an argument that Hitler and
Stalin were the direct result of a depressing philosophical framework that
became fashionable in the nineteenth century, in which a deliberate choice
was made to attribute all of humanity's accumulated spiritual wisdom to
unfounded supersition. On what rational basis could one make this choice?
Is it a choice we want to continue to make?
Aldous Huxley wrote a book called "The Perennial Philosophy." In it he
argues that the world's religions exhibit enormous diversity in their
exoteric manifestation, which consist of systems of intertwined metaphor,
mythology, and cultural practices. However, if one digs deeper, one finds
a stunning similarity in their inner, esoteric, mystical core. Huxley's
argument is carefully made. He draws examples from many different
religious traditions to make his points. One could describe that book as
articulation of a scientific hypothesis together with justification of that
hypothesis on the basis of empirical evidence. What I've been trying to
articulate in this dialogue are some of my understandings of fundamental
aspects of this esoteric core, gained from years of reading and thinking
about the writings of serious religious thinkers from all the world's
religious systems (with an admitted bias toward the Judeo-Christian
tradition because I find those writings far more accessible).
David, you have set up a straw-man definition of God by taking literally
the mythology of one particular religious tradition. What you have done
would be as if I based my view of physics on my son's seventh grade science
textbook. Then you proceed to debunk that straw man. Well, I agree with
you. That straw man should be debunked. But we've known that for
centuries. You're fighting an old war, one that was won by Galileo
although it took a few centuries for the fighting to die down.
Buddha said, "Don't look at my finger. Look where it is pointing." In
other words, don't believe the literal truth of the words in religious
texts. The purpose of the words is to spark an understanding of something.
Buddha is urging us to seek that something. I hypothesize that if try, we
can articulate a new, 20th century global exoteric manifestation, which
will work far better as a finger pointing the way to that something, than
the diverse collection of ancient traditions that have lost much of their
force because the patent falsehood of their cosmologies and explanations of
empirical phenomena impedes understanding. We will never pin down the
esoteric core in any model. But building the exoteric manifestation could
be classified as a scientific activity.
Kathy
