The End of the World as We Know It (With apologies to REM), and God's Activity

Question five is very simple: do I believe the world is soon coming to an end, or not? Having grown up Pentecostal, I was trained to believe it was going to happen tomorrow, if not today, the Rapture anyway. Not surprisingly, the more you tell a kid that and the more it doesn't happen, the more he actively disbelieves. After I fled Pentecostalism, I found better hermeneutical models to explain why premillenial dispensationalism, within the context of eschatological theology, is a crock of shit. I could convert to Christianity a million more times in my life, and if I did, I could never embrace that jigsaw puzzle of sado-masochistic hermeneutics. No, the world is not coming to an end soon in a divine apocalypse. This is not to say we can't destroy it, or at least life as we know it. Those are different questions though. As to the religious one, no. Don't believe in a god who is actively involved, so it follows that I don't believe in a god who comes to tread out the winepress of his indignation. (And that, friends, is still one of the most bad ass metaphors of all time. Go, John!)

The sixth question is way more interesting, and much harder for me to answer. Do I believe I've personally experienced the presence of God before? Well, first the quibble. I typically don't impersonally experience things, so let's leave that modifier out, shall we. The answer is "I don't know." I've been honest all along that I've experienced things that are hard to explain without reference to metaphysical analogies, but that's only because I was taught to use metaphysical language to explain those things. Advances in science of mind and neurology lead me to believe that many of these "transcendent" experiences are easily explainable in terms of chemistry or brain stimuli. This is not to say that god isn't somehow involved; reductionism is surely a flaw in reasoning when it assumes too much, as well. I find it curious that schizophrenia is often associated with flights of divine fantasy or horrific visions of hellish realms. This isn't to say that all religious people are deluded; rather, it points to a connection between brain function and religious experience.

I've approached this from the opposite way of many people. The experience defines, for them, the ability to believe, but it's a bit of a cheat. If I've been taught that I'll have an experience, and that the experience is named Jesus or angel or spirit or demon, I'm not only more inclined to allow for it, I've also been handed a set of terms to describe something that is way more interesting if left undefined. How would someone who has never heard of Jesus or god describe her experience of the "the holy"? I'm sure there are those out there who claim, like Saul, that Jesus introduced himself in the midst of a vision or apparition. For most of us, though, experiencing god's presence was always an exercise in frustration. Charismatics fixed that by working up an emotional frenzy and mistaking catharsis for presence. The rest of us muddled along hoping for some affirmation that this critter called god actually existed and would throw us a fuckin' bone.

So, I decided that I'd approach it differently. The question was finally allowed, what kind of god is god, and I refused to let a truncated reading of the Bible answer the question for me. As I worked through my graduate program, I posed more and more questions to the various models of god my professors, friends, classmates, and I postulated. What I discovered eventually was that the sheer weight of doubt (the good kind) finally militated against theism. I came to believe that we used trite answers to explain god's non-presence. "He wants us to search for him with all our heart." Really? You know, I have a job and a kid and a mortgage, and if he loves us so much, why not actually, actively enter the relationship? And how does one know when "all my heart" is engaged? Horse shit. "He's god; he can do what he wants." Excellent, then you're better off not trusting him in the end, because if he can do what he wants, he can also lie about all those "promises" in the Bible. "It takes a lifetime to get good at hearing god's voice." Why? I learn my mother's voice before I'm a year old. This is supposed to be a relationship, right? It was just too much bullshit stacked on top of excuses for god's absence, excuses we'd been taught were actual spiritually mature answers. (I do fret over being an idiot for as long as I was, by the way.)

The experience wasn't allowed to define belief; belief had to answer the same questions as non-belief, and quite frankly, belief failed. That still leaves unanswered questions about experiences, but I'm in no hurry to answer them. Once I abandoned theism, it was much easier to stop being angry at god for not being around. It's rather like being mad at my dog for not being a slug; she is what she is, not what I prefer she be. God is not personal and knowable, I don't think, assuming she exists at all, and so I'd have to say no with qualifications on this one.

Comments

[cheek]

Divine absence is, along with the argument[s] from evil, the major rational obstacle to conscientious theism. Assuming that our epistemic trump value is truth (not by any means a safe assumption, but on a contextualist picture, fair enough for this context) then both of these problems are in fact problems for theism. Now, I tend to think that our minds aren't very good at evaluating metaphysical concepts. Having evolved to be very good at a number of things, it's not clear that conceptual analysis need be one of them. Therefore, I'm immediately suspicious of any argument that claims to have clearly or otherwise demonstrated the truth value of virtually any non-tautological statement containing reference to metaphysical entities. That said, while I find arguments from evil to be the most conceptually persuasive attacks on theism, I find the argument from divine absence much more psychically arresting. In essence, it is an argument to the best explanation, and so rather suspect just by virtue of its type. We know full well that the most exhaustive data-sets will always underdetermine the theories they supposedly support, so in metaphysical areas where it's not even clear what counts as data, underdetermination is just the tip, not even the tip really, of an iceberg that might turn out instead to be a vast undersea continent (or to be a lost Atlantis, conjured by clever minds in our cultural pre-history and preserved over time by our conceptual denseness). However, despite this conceptual flaw in the argument, it just resonates with my experience of the world. People who care about me show up when I need them to, and they go out of their way to demonstrate their affection, often at great personal effort and even sacrifice. How can it be that a superlative being who feels a similar way, is either unable or unwilling to do at least as much? This isn't an argument so much as a natural response to stimuli. If the Big Guy in the perfectly white lab coat stops placing sugary treats at the end of the maze, eventually I'm going to quit running it.

[MyQuest]

This is one of your best posts ever, I think