h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm not entirely clear on the anthropomorphism or otherwise of the Muslim notion of Allah/god. What is clear, however, is that the Muslim god fantasy involves an active, intelligent, personal agency of some kind, which posessess, among other attributes, a will.

This will is expressed in the Qur'an -- however it may be subject to interpretation -- which is believed to be the direct Word of God, and must be obeyed without question. Acceptance of and belief in the Qur'an therefore rather strongly implies one knows the will of God.

Similarly, the will of the Judeo-Christian god is purportedly expressed in the Bible -- which, as we know, is also variously interpreted

The point is, a 'will to do', to 'cause effects' and thus affect the environment, implies a being to possess that will. Whether that being is anthropomorphic or otherwise may be interesting from both a historical and psychological perspective, but is largely irrelevant to the fundamental 'concept' of a divine being.

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>.. to assert that there is/are no gods at all.<

Non-belief is not an assertion. It is the refutation of unsupported assertions of others.

OK. Fair cop. I'm just keeping my mind open to deal with the next bit of The View from the Centre of the Universe . . . which I put off finishing in order to read some Vonnegut, which I have now finished, so back to work.

<>

Actually, until someone can sufficiently prove the affirmative, one can do nothing more sensible than insist it isn't true. AA doesn't do any kind of follow-up study or anything remotely resembling scientific to quantitatively prove their effectiveness. All we have is their word for it.

Good point, the Mugwump. I need to consult some people I know who work in addiction counselling. I suspect that twelve-step programmes *are* effective, with or without higher powers...although as I understand it, there has been a shift in emphasis towards reduction and cognitive skills training, as opposed to abstinence and turning one's whole life upside-down.



The Recitation as the literal word of god: No - I'm really not sure that this is the case. God gave the revelations. Mohammed spoke the words. Humans - even prophets - aren't up to the job of expressing or even understanding god's will. That's hard for anyone brought up in a Christian-influenced culture to get their head around.

But what would I know?

(I used to know an imam well enough to ask, when I lived next door to a madrassa, but I haven't seen him in a while)



That's what I love about you, Recumbentman: you're challenging.

I had a thread organised in my mind along the lines that to redefine god in the light of modern scientific knowledge is disingenuous. Personal, interventionist gods used to be all the rage but are no longer sustainable, and the theists have shifted accordingly. Hence my suspicion that when the brightest of them talk about 'god', what they mean is 'stuff' (or in Rabbi Blue's case - see previous link - 'human goodness'). But obviously such concepts of god have always been around.

Let me put a bit more thought into it.

>Humans - even prophets - aren't up to the job of expressing or even understanding god's will...<

Yes, well, that's kind of what I meant by ".. subject to interpretation.."

By 'direct' I mean 'issuing forth from' or 'proceeding from', so in this sense I'm confident both the Qur'an and the Bible are regarded by their adherents as the revealed Word of God -- subject to interpretation by the priests, popes, and imams, of course.

Now that you have mentioned it, I do think _some_ Muslims and _some_ Christians regard certain portions of their respective holy books in the 'literal' sense, and I think most here agree that rabid perpective, hopefully rare, is obviously extremely lethal.

Admittedly, some of the more colorful Bible verses and Qur'an sura do seem rather unequivocal, especially those in which the all-loving deity condemns unbelievers to eternal torment...

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Ok, it's been a long, busy day here, so the following is a bit of a rough, rambling approximation.
I've been thinking about doing a piece on free will, but it hasn't quite crystalized...

Be gentle


To act according to what you believe is to perform a willful act, is it not?

If you believe you are acting or have acted according to the Divine plan, or in 'submission' to God's will, it implies you have understood at least the portion of that will relevant to the act itself.

For example, you may claim to be incapable of understanding the entirety of God's will, yet in following a particular dogma, performing a particular ritual or prayer, etc implies you presume to know what God desires, in that particular instance, since you claim you are guided by the Divine will.

(Coincidentally, those bits of God's will which the believer claims to understand usually seem to benefit the believer, or at least annoy the believer's enemies..)

I agree the less irrational theists will readily admit to their theological limitations.
But even the moderate theists proceed as if they do know some portion of what God wants them to do, and how God wants them to act
Therefore, the theist claims, at the very least, an implicit understanding of a part of the Divine plan -- which is the expression of God's will.
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Hmm. Reading that back, it seems less unambiguous than I would like. Does any of it make sense?

>>Does any of it make sense?

Well, no it doesn't...but that's not your fault. As mentioned previously, Free Will vs Predestination is an artificial and irrelevant opposition.

Whatever decison one makes, it is necessarly the result of physical forces (neurones, shaped by biology and experience reacting in accordance with external inputs). *In principle* it would be possible to predict any decision. In practice, it would require all the information in the universe.

So is 'God's Will' to act in accordance with the natural laws of the universe? Well...we have to do that. Or is it to 'Do The Right Thing'. Well...that's a human question, not a divine one. (and what 'the right thing' is is a complex question bringing in biology, psychology, sociology...and 'ethics', whatever an ethic is.)

But Free Will is an utterly unimportant issue, raised to dizzy heights by theologians.

Well it was a puzzle! The best treatment I've seen is still "The Moral Animal" by Robert Wright http://www.scifidimensions.com/Mar04/moralanimal.htm

That does look intersting.

I liked:
"One subtlety that Wright drives home and bears repeating here: our "genes" don't want us to do anything; rather, our behavior is the result of a natural process that has no intention."

One mistake Dawkins made was in titling his book "The Selfish Gene". I know he doesn't mean to imply that genes have any form of intentionality, but it's an unfortunate and crippling metaphor that he uses time and time again. I'm currently listening to his 'The Ancestor's Tale' on audiobook on my morning commute and he does it there too.

For myself...I'm not meaning to imply that biological reductionism is the only language we can use to talk about ethics. Sometimes higher order language is appropriate. Indeed, it's a multifactorial issue, with various things going on at different levels (genetic, organic, neurochemical; ecological; societal...etc.). We shouldn't make the mistake - as someone else is currently doing elsewhere on this site - of taking biological and psychological findings on (eg) the limits of human altruism under certain circumstances and generalising that into a worldview. (We care about our own family's welfare more than about others...therefore capitalism is the natural order. )

>As mentioned previously, Free Will vs Predestination is an artificial and irrelevant opposition...
But Free Will is an utterly unimportant issue, raised to dizzy heights by theologians. <

So, I'm preaching to the choir here, eh?

Theoligizers by and large do not realize, or refuse to consider, that free will/predestination is an artificial construct

Religion itself is based upon a fantasy; a mis-perception or mis-understanding of the nature of causation.

The perception of causation seems in turn to arise from a feeling of personal agency: the persistent 'self' -- upon which the 'free will' premise necessarily relies

Dawkins was painfully careful to clarify, loud clear and many times over, that the genes had no desires. The title of the book TSG is excellent in my view because it puts into focus just what is going on. The genes couldn't give a phucch for us (or themselves); but their programming is honed to promote the survival of them, blithely regardless of us.

And as Steve Pinker said, if my genes don't like me using contraception, they can go and jump in a lake.

You're right...Dawkins does clarify repeatedly. But I think the anthropomorphic metaphors stick. For example - in The Ancestor's tale, he keeps talking about 'enterprising individuals'.

There must be better analogies. In the earlier parts of TSG, hints at gene replication as a chemical process.

But I *definitely* wouldn't want to make the leap from chemistry to ethics.

Me neither.

I've finished The View from the Centre of the Universe, and it does end up as I suspected (from my atheist brother's enthusiastic reaction) by claiming the right to a new use for old language. There are no gods outside the universe, they say . . . but we *can* use the mystical language all the same.

We want to use it because on the one hand the existence of everything outside our familiar size-frame (from dust to stars) is alien to our common sense anyway: we can't perceive cells or atoms or particles or events at the Planck length unaided (if at all), nor can we perceive galaxy clusters or the radiation from the Big Bang except by the use of machines that severely stretch the word "perceive".

And on the other hand, metaphors are the right and proper way (they say) to make a world-view accessible. We don't have to become mechanics to learn to drive, and we don't have to become astrophysicists to get a useful grasp on the cosmos. We now have, thanks to burgeoning science, for the first time in history a theory of the universe that may actually be true. We should spread a usable understanding of this world-view by the same way our ancestors in previous civilisations did, in stories.

They therefore humbly suggest appropriating the word 'god' to stand for the forces and processes of nature that are too big or small for our normal perception and intuitive grasp. Those counterintuitive yet eternal and reliable motions that have produced us and are embodied in us and all we live with. It is for us, they say, (boldly leaping into ethical language) to align ourselves both mentally and spiritually (heart and mind) with those processes, see that we are made of the rarest stuff in the universe (stardust) and that we are centrally placed in our own time and space, and take responsibility for the planet ("Think cosmically, act globally").

They also make much of the fact that we are now in the centre of the billion-year period during which this planet will be best placed to support life.

They repudiate what they call the "existential" despairing attitude of Russell and others; the idea that it's no use trying, the world will be incinerated by the sun in 5 or 6 billion years. We have been around in our present form for maybe half a million years, and we can look forward to a thousand times that more at least.

Right now (they finish) we are the generation that can make or break the future. Nobody expects the world will support another doubling of population, nor can we continue economic growth at recent rates. Either we take it in hand, and make the changes that count, severely slowing our growth to a sustainable level, just as the pre-Big Bang exponential inflation slowed down in the bang itself (now gradually speeding up again) or we invite catastrophe.

Amen to that, say I.

I take the point that we should make a metaphysical land grab. Atheists have the same grand conceptions and Fimbly Feelings as any theist - it's just that we don't attribute them to external influences - and in a sense we might as well inherit the language of redundant religion.

But. In the extant linguistic world, these words have baggage. They have overtones and asumptions that go with them. Admittedly, these overtones vary from person to person. To one person, 'god' might be a white-bearded smiter, to another the intelligence who answers our prayers...or a mysterious thingy that's definitely a real agent but science is too blind to see it...or grand cosmic intelligence...etc.

Now my problem is with the fluidity of religious concepts. It seems to me that religion allows the religious to make it up as they go along - any given god is no more or less valid than any other. It's that kind of "Anything goes - therefore I'm right" thinking I'm against. So I might well have a degree of commonality wuth the more atheistic of the religious who define god as "the stuff the universe is made of" (eg Berkeley?)...but I'd rather not give the impression of tolerating more generalised definitions of god/ spirit/ soul. (or do I mean more specific?)

I'm not convinced that words like 'god' should be used in these times by atheists without heavy qualification: "When I say 'god', I don't mean anything with a specific form, nor anything that intervenes in the universe, nor anything with its own intelligence, nor anything with a special interest in human beings, nor anything that sets moral laws, nor anything that requires any kind of different analysis than the rest of the physical universe..." and so on. Phew! What a mouthful.



I'm reminded of the - true - story of the woman travelling amongst south-east Asian hill tribes. She was vegetarian, but since the local language didn't have simple categories for food, she'd have to list all the things she couldn't eat: "I don't eat pigs, I don't eat chickens, I don't eat carp, I don't eat eels, I don't eat ducks...". To add to her woes, she couldn't quite get the hang of the language's tonal system. Dhe would come out with, "I don't eat bicycles, I don't eat huts, I don't eat sleepiness, I don't eat blue..."

Isn't it about time we re-started Lang and Ling?

Poor old Langaling got swallowed back into Brit-Eng.

The "religious language" is a very small part of the book, and I brought it up here first because that's what I had mentioned a few posts back.

The authors are concerned to counteract the "existential despair" attitude that they found themselves caught up in back in the 80s, despite having a whale of a time working at exciting discoveries and theories along with brilliant creative stimulating people.

Old joke: Public lecturer announces that in six billion years the sun will expand to burn this planet to a crisp.
Man in the back: How many years????
Lecturer: About six billion . . .
Man: Phew! For a moment there I thought you said six *million*!

Vonnegut's son gave the best answer I know of for existential despair:

"We're here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

Or, as the man hisself put it:

"Goddamn it, you've got to be kind."




(Has sufficient time elapsed for an application for Atheist beatification? Can we fast track him, like they're doing with JPII?)

I was listening to Dawkins' 'The Ancestors Tale' this morning. He was dismissing the argument of irreduceable complexity (of propellor-driven bacteria) as an argument for Intelligent Design/ creationism. He mentioned the religious biologist, Kenneth Miller, author of 'Finding Darwin's God' who dismisses ID as 'sacriligeous' for its poverty of imagination. (Dawkins' term is 'lazy').

I'm still puzzled by the whole notion of the religious scientist (I guess I need to read the book!) As mentioned above, Atheists can hace religion-like feelings about...let's mis-call it, for concenience 'Creation'. But as soon as Darwin is examined, these feelings stop being about god.

I really, truly don't get why some still choose to call this great, grand thing god. It's surely not the same thing as the pre-Darwinian gods, even the less anthropomorphic/ interventionist ones. What's the difference? Intentionality, maybe. The idea that the universe exists for a purpose. (And following on from that, that we conscious animals have a special place in it).

The book certainly warms to the topic that "we conscious animals have a special place" in the universe, but does not pretend that the universe had a purposeful beginning (it just popped out of Eternal Inflation, which is their current theory of what might be going on outside our big-bang-bubble).

They are level-headed on this: concepts like "purpose" only have meaning in our local size-group.

Why revitalise discredited language? Simply because it has its use.

I'm sort of prepared to accept that we have a special place - but it's a place we carve out for ourselves.

...but the religious try to grandify it by saying our place was ordained by god.

And much follows from that. Very much.