James Le Fanu: Why Us? (The limitations of science)

by John Clinch , Wednesday, July 08, 2009, 11:32 (5400 days ago) @ dhw

Thank you, dhw, for pointing out my contradictions. I mean it: one never normally gets to put one's views on the line, as it were, and I haven't been articulating mine very well. - I never claimed that matters theological were not paradoxical and I am always open to changing my mind and often do. I'll have another stab and maybe you can tell me what you think: - I think what I mean is that what we observe is Nature and only Nature (materialism). I witness and experience nothing outside of it (monism). Wittgenstein's dictum sums it up beautifully: "There is nothing supernatural about the world but that it is". He also famously said "whereof we cannot speak, thereof we should be silent" and maybe I should just shut up right now! - Let's run with it, though. Nagging away is the idea that something is needed to explain why you start with a quark and you "end" with a jaguar - or a soul. Arguably, the brute fact of the existence of the world invites an ultimate explanation that one may prefer to describe as transcendent ("the Transcendent God") or, alternatively (or maybe in addition), an immanent creative principle that inheres within Nature of which we can know nothing ("the Immanent God"). Here, we are rudderless, I'm afraid. There is nothing in our experience of Nature which should lead us to any particular conclusion - not miracles, not facile "Godunnit" dogmas, not human goodness and certainly not the meretricious answers provided by "religion" - nothing. All we have is the fact that we exist and the vastness of a pitiless Universe. - My ham-fisted, and periodic, attachment to pantheism is but a rather pathetic and necessarily limited response to the eternal question. With my human intellectual limitations, I can't bring myself to accept Nature-as-God but I can't fully accept that Nature requires no explanation either and I am sometimes gripped by an inexplicable conviction that Spinozistic pantheism was grappling towards a profound, if paradoxical, solution. So, I have to conclude that I'm agnostic on the question of an Immanent God, though tending towards theism. - I have in the past been persauded by panentheism, that it may be meaningful to posit "God" as immanent AND transcendent but then I catch myself agreeing that God-as-a-transcendent being seems to me an utterly ridiculous concept. I'm falling between two stools here - an inability to accept the western "sky god" concept and an inability to just accept the pointless plentiude of existence, which seems to follow from atheism. Like you in a different context, I'm caught between what seems to be two intellectually unsatisfactory conclusions - hence I am agnostic on the question of a Transcendent God, though tending towards atheism. - But I believe in the Truth, whatever that is - to some, that makes me a theist. 
I think its time we defined our terms. I'm not agnostic on the quesion of a belief in Yahweh, or Ra, or Baal, or the Trinity. If any of those are what is meant by "God", I'm very clear - I'm an atheist. But that's not the whole answer. Is this any clearer? Probably not! - [PS. I simply meant that atheists have no dogmas - so, they are not formally "dogmatic" but, of course, they can and are often are forceful etc - thank God!]