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Noah -> RE: The Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Image Ever Taken (9/16/2006 6:16:43 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: meatcleaver
Again, there is no way of knowing whether ones experiences are divine or not but knowing that a sense of the divine can be induced causes me to doubt that divine experiences are truely divine.
Well, I'm not sure on what can be based a definitive claim like the one I've bolded above.
I mean what if someone just can know what you say they can't? What would the discussion of this really be about? What if there is a way of knowing, quite worthy of the name, as it were, which neither you nor I have yet experienced? Insofar as one hews to unambiguous objective evidence as the standard of knowledge this bold(ed) claim can be made, sure. But we have seen that this standard disqualifies its own truth and so presumably it belongs in the garbage however seductively it calls to our rational intuition.
Anyway you seem to take your experiences and your doubts both as matters of some consequence and I see those two things as marks in your favor regardless of where they may lead you.
quote:
If I want my tea sweetened it wouldn't really matter to me if the sugar experience is genuine or not, I would have what I wanted.
I think you just said a mouthful.
We could take a dialectical turn and decide to describe the taste of sugar and the taste of The Pink Stuff both as genuinely sweet.
We could stop there or we could order another pitcher and have an argument about whether a God Of Truth would suffer to exist a dietary product which pleased us via deception, or whether this was a work of The Prince of Lies.
There was a nice novel several years ago about a nun who wrote books about what many people were happy to call Divine visions. We eventually learn that she has a brain tumor. She asks herself whether, if she has it removed, the sweet visions will stop. If this is so, is this any evidence one way or the other as to whether The Divinity chose to gift her with visions by this modality as opposed to some other, say? Another question explored by the novel is that of which would be the more creditable act of faith, removing the mass or keeping it? Obviously this would highlight questions of the relativity of what we might call spiritual valu and pragmatic value.
One could take a reductionist view that the nun is nothing but the sum of her biochemistry and that both the visions and the tumor are inconclusive, partial, but yet telling inductive evidence of this truth. Who knows? this might be the deal. But of course no reductionist argument can have any more probative value than any other so if this argument does point to the truth it does so by a sort of lucky coincidence, as you might say.
One could also take the view that by plopping the tumor in her head the Divinity would have been preserving for her the opportunity to hold her belief in The Divinity as a matter of faith primarily rather than as a sort of empirical belief, which in one sense is rather paltry in comparison to faith.
I mean which kind of friend would you rather have when you're being framed for embezzlement? The one who believes in you against the obvious evidence (i.e. has faith in you) enough to go and find un-obvious evidence by which to vindicate you? Or would you rather have a friend who says: "Call me when you can show me objective proof of your innocence?
Which friendhip is sweeter?
Which orientation toward you bespeaks--for you--Love?
Some religions posit a loving God, some even equate God and Love in a fairly strong and plain way. I don't know how one finds deductively conclusive evidence for any sort of love--never mind Divine love.
But I have met several people who nevertheless believe in love.
Your most cynical acquaintance can make the argument that your best friend of thirty year's duration holds no love in his heart for you. Yet you can choose to believe in your friend's love. And for the most part, large groups of people won't attack you on internet message boards for believing in this thing, this love, the existence of which cannot be shown in such a way as to satisfy someone who chooses for his own reasons not to believe in it despite your testimony of the richness, the subjective indubitableness of your experience of this love, the existence of which the cynic steadfastly denies.
By the way, speaking of that nun novel the name of which I can't recall, I think that a novel is an appropriate tool for the exploration of these notions in exactly the sense that a set of syllogisms isn't isn't. As I recall, that novel didn't attempt to form a conclusion for the reader but left it to each person to approach whatever truth my lie there, each on his own terms and by the light of his own experience.
I think that calm (if not dispassionate) and open-minded, open-hearted discussion is another such appropriate tool.
My personal thanks to all who have approached these bizarre matters here in this thread in just such a spirit.
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