KARL JASPERS FORUM
TA112 (Müller)
Response
7 (to C7, RW Moodey)
THEISM AND THE
UNSTRUCTURED - WHOSE
PURPOSE AND CONCERN ?
by Herbert FJ Müller
14 March 2009, posted 21 March 2009
[1]
[RWM]
‘...for there
to be a purpose there has to be a person who intends that purpose’
[HFJM]
Indeed, and that illustrates that our purposeful thinking is (and can only be) anthropocentric. Exclusive
objectivism (tries to) eliminate the subject, although its original purpose is
only to minimize subjective bias, which does not require absence of subjects.
[2]
[RWM]
‘religious
believers ... interpret evolutionary theory as attempting to go beyond what can
be studied by science by attempting to answer what Tillich calls "a
question of ultimate concern."
Dawkins seems to me to be doing this by claiming that evolutionary
theory disproves the existence of God.’
[HFJM]
Indeed again. The clash is between anthropocentric ‘purpose’
and supposedly mind-independent ‘chance mutation
plus natural selection’.
(Brown :) ‘ Tillich defines faith, and indirectly religion, as
"ultimate concern." Religion
is direction or movement toward the ultimate or the unconditional And God
rightly defined might be called the Unconditional. God, in the true sense, is indefinable. Since
the Unconditional precedes our minds and precedes all created things, God
cannot be confined by the mind or by words. Tillich sees God as Being-Itself,
or the "Ground of all Being." For this reason there cannot be a God.
There cannot even be a "highest God," for even that concept is
limiting. We cannot make an object out
of God. And the moment we say he is the
highest God or anything else, we have made him an object. Thus, beyond the God of the Christian or the
God of the Jews, there is the "God beyond God." This God cannot be said to exist or not to
exist in the sense that we exist. Either
statement is limiting. We cannot make a
thing out of God, no matter how holy this thing may be, because there
still remains something behind the holy thing which is its ground or basis, the
"ground of being." ’
[3]
That is in agreement with what you write :
[RWM]
‘I agree
with Aquinas that we cannot know what God is, but only what god is not. In this sense, even a Christian theological
notion of God is a conceptual void.’
[HFJM]
Is there in that case a difference between (a) theism (especially in its
mystical forms) and (b) the non-theism of Buddhism or Taoism
? In (a) much of the agency and also the conceptual structure (and perhaps some of the
responsibility) are originally shifted away from the subject to an imagined ontic ‘outside’, or rather replaced by an anthropomorphic
outside agent, and responsibility is largely toward that agent (implying belief
in mind-independent reality, MIR). But in mysticism this shift is secondarily
reversed, or eliminated. Then what happens to the person-likeness of God ? That God is
not a thing corresponds to the fact that the subject cannot be a thing or
object, the key problem for the conceptual mind-brain puzzle. In (b) there is no shift to start with, and
there is presumably also no primary (outside) structure; these are determining characteristics.
[4]
[RWM]
‘ I don't know what it means to attribute a purpose to the body from an
atheistic perspective. ’
[HFJM]
This I guess amounts to asking how a subject-exclusive naturalistic view deals
with ‘purpose’. I have
tried to outline something like that in terms of the (as-if-) MIR-view of
biology (in TA112 [4]) : ‘ The
subject’s activity may be difficult to
see in the more elementary structures
like qualia and gestalt-formations, because they arise biologically, automatically, and are
thus not deliberately influenced or designed
by the subject, who starts thinking from the later deliberate stage, and
perceives the early one mistakenly as
‘given’ in a pre-structured (ready-made)
state. Spontaneous
gestalt-generation is
indeed a main reason for the prevalent
ontological leap of faith to a mind-independent world in the MIR-views. But contrary to this belief, pain, colour,
smell, gestalt-formation, touch sensation
are produced by the organisms’ activity, and would not occur without it.
And
more generally, all biological structures, starting with self-replicating
molecules, even before reaching the level of the DNA mechanism, affirm themselves; they sort of assert ‘that is how I am and what I do’. To what extent they will further replicate
depends on their success (natural selection, Darwin). The long term overall results of spontaneous-mutation-plus-natural-selection
may be misinterpreted
as-if acquired individual
characteristics were inherited - or
also, by the way, as-if they had been purposefully designed by an intelligent
agent, such as
God or Nature. These views are extensions from the anthropocentric-design view,
which is our only available start-point for thinking. ’
Objectively
one can probably understand human deliberate
intelligent design as a continuation of biological development. Chance mutation plus natural selection becomes structuring-positing plus feedback evaluation
of viability during use. That might also
respond to a
question which Byers poses in his book on mathematics (p.321) : whether it is reasonable to say that natural
processes are intelligent. Over the
long term, they behave as-if they were intelligent.
[5]
But the supposedly subject-exclusive MIR-belief
(be it theistic or naturalistic) is created within subject-inclusive human
thinking (from TA112 [6]) : ‘... with varying
degree of subjectively purposeful deliberation, as well as of interpersonal communication. Understanding and deliberate structuring
occurs within ongoing subject-inclusive experience, which is not only
goal-directed, but also encompassing (umgreifend), as
Jaspers emphasized. For 0-D, the encompassment is a fundamental condition
and determining feature. In
order to deal
with the mind-brain question, the encompassment needs to be understood as valid without
restriction (and this goes actually further
than Jaspers’ proposition, who still maintained some MIR-belief).
Because
the mind creates and modifies its structures actively and concurrently within
ongoing experience, thinking cannot be confined to already-structured
algorithmic processes. For the same reason, the possibility of metaphysics-ontology, i.e., of pre-structured mind-independent ‘outside reality’ is explicitly excluded as such; it is converted into subject-inclusive
reality-design. That leads directly
to the 0-D position. This consequence
of the encompassment aspect of experience may at first come as a surprise, but is
inevitable. One can commence thinking
only from this anthropomorphic design start-point within ongoing experience : the subject(s)’ activity is always included. The
awareness that reality is constructed with subject-participation is itself an
aspect of reality. It becomes a fundamental
insight of the theory of knowledge (epistemology, Erkenntnis-Theorie).
’
[6]
The following conclusions from the 0-D point of view (see TA112 [1], [2]) are
tentative; they are meant for discussion. (See also TA112, especially [12], [13], and [15.8].)
For theistic doctrines of all types, which have a strong medieval flavour, a central
question is how to remain relevant in dealing with evolving society and
science. The Vatican opinion so far is that evolution and belief in God are not in
conflict. But since reconciliation of religion with science
is a declared recent aim of the Vatican,
positive statements for instance of how
chance mutation plus natural selection is
to be reconciled with creation by God would also be needed, in addition to this negative assertion. Creationists
need to acknowledge that they have to create an anthropomorphic purposeful
God if He is to create them, though it
is not likely that they will do so.
For
science the question is how to maintain inclusion of subjects and their need
for holistic thinking, despite the need for objective knowledge. Objective ‘theories of everything’ are
impossible, for instance because the subject(s) cannot become structured. In Dawkins’
view a created outside
agent called ‘Nature’
seems to replace God; unless
he wants to advocate a purely functional (algorithmic, computer-like) type of
thinking. In the
latter case there would be not only no holistic concern (he
says that the existence of God is to be decided on the basis of natural science), but also subjects
including himself would be eliminated.
For
non-theistic religions like some forms of Buddhism and Taoism,
there is presumably no ontic ‘outside’, because their start-and-anchor point is
unstructured. Structures (and the differences between them)
develop within this unstructured matrix;
they are not ontic but pragmatic only. This
avoids some of the mentioned conceptual problems; and also, most people would probably agree
that they are not devoid of ultimate concern.
Holistic
structures of theistic, naturalistic and other kinds can actually
be understood as originating within such
an unstructured matrix, for as-if-MIR
stabilizing purposes; the unstructured matrix would then appear to be
a suitable basis for them as well. The
unstructured anchor point has been used for about the same length of time,
about 2500 years - since what Jaspers called ‘axis time’ - as
the theistic methods, but it still
seems to be of undiminished contemporary relevance, and avoids conceptual
difficulties.
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REFERENCE
Brown DM, Ultimate Concern - Tillich in Dialogue
by D. Mackenzie Brown
http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=538&C=598
Jaspers K (1955), Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte. Fischer Bücherei (Piper, München).
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Herbert FJ Müller
e-mail <herbert.muller (at)
mcgill.ca>