So one problem is, to begin with, that some people will always want to have a leg up on God and want to use it for their own advantage. I’m here, I’m now, I’m real, in a way that the law or God or these supposed religious truths aren’t. I’m tangible and immediate to my perception in a way that they aren’t. And that gives me the right to override them where I see fit, because in some sense I am ontological superior and more complete.

One might also wonder, if it is a good thing for people to believe and act as if these things were true, simply true, so they can derive the benefits and advantages they confer, and there isn’t some position external to a religious commitment of some kind, no godlike, purely objective ground without any of the clutter of the structures that underlie perception and value and action and our own biological and psychological specificity, on which we can stand. Then what’s so terrible about people believing in the thing? What’s the big difference?

If you have to think and act as if you believed something, and this something seems like the best something, and maps well onto our fundamental phenomenological experience of ourselves and the world, then why say it’s silly to believe it? What exactly are you hoping to spoil or change or gain by calling it absurd to actually believe it as if it were real? If that’s essentially what you have to do anyway? It seems to me more like an objection to the nature of knowledge, the self, and the world as such, the kind of place it is and our limitations in it, rather than an objection to Christianity specifically.

I think that those of us who struggle with this kind of skepticism, among which I include myself, need to make some room for people to live and learn to work with the eternal truths we share and not get so hung up on the epistemological doubts and details of how those people represent and embody those truths to themselves and to others.

The Bible is very clear that our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the powers and principalities, with the invisible world of spirits, ideas, ideologies, mind viruses, mental pathogens, life giving transtemporal truths, archetypes, living structures of meaning, whatever you want to call them. They’re real, they’re powerful. They shape our reality and embodied lives. So make your peace and focus on that and don’t get more hung up on the representational framework that lets different people engage with those meanings and realities than you have to.

I understand why that’s hard, I’m a skeptic by nature. But I shouldn’t let that prevent me from engaging with these things that seem to be real in some very important sense and from engaging with other people who perceive their importance too, and from helping them and even learning from them. For all that a small town person of faith may seem dull and unlearned and unsophisticated, they may actually have a pretty good bead on life and much of its fundamental realities and be better able to navigate it and face its challenges and recognize its threats, better than I can.

I think that also plays into Thomas Sowell’s contention that it’s very easy for intellectuals to value their own individually expansive but ontologically limited experience and thoughts and discount the wisdom of common humanity, which may be less individually expansive but more ontologically extended. And I think Jordan is saying that you can’t so easily discount that, or the collective faith of mankind in some transpersonal reality.

It’s not that truth is determined by a vote. But you can’t so easily discount the collective knowledge, empirical evidence of experience, and innate biologically and psychologically embodied wisdom of a whole species. It’s at least worth a look to see what kind of work it’s actually doing.

—

The statistical model of an approach to faith isn’t really a great way to view it. I don’t think anyone ever argued that Jesus rose and saved them because that was something that was likely to happen. Even the people who wrote down the new testament, according to their own accounts, found it shocking, unprecedented, and never saw it coming. And how much of history was statistically likely? How statistically likely is it, based in a casual survey of the universe, for life to arise? Not very likely, is our best answer. So are we then to conclude that the argument that it did, in this one case, actually arise, is therefore implausible?

It’s just a silly framework to use. A more plausible framework for analysis would be something closer to the subject. What kind of evidence do we have for the lives and deeds of other persons whose existence and whose deeds we take as factual? How far removed from the events are the sources that confirm those facts? Is the fact of Jesus’ existence and his acts more or less well established than those other cases? For the record, the evidence, both in quantity and proximity, is far, far better than for other historical figures. It’s actually shocking how removed our sources are for the lives of most people we think we know all about.

It’s also worth noting that Jesus was not a Roman general or a senator or a king or member of the Sanhedrin, or even a major landowner or political leader. As far as the society of the time was concerned, he was a nobody who talked to nobodies. He was some weird guy who, along with tons of others, got executed by the Roman state, in his case for some only vaguely understood religious crimes. He was not a subject of official interest whose life could have been expected to be recorded, much less make any historical impact. His followers were, in general, neither wealthy nor powerful, now were the religious or political authorities of the time in any way desirous of granting him any special significance or notoriety. Nor was Israel at that time a country of any special significance on the world stage.

And yet we have a remarkable amount of information about Jesus, recorded very close in time (compared to other figures) to the time of the events, especially considering where he lived and who he was (or rather, who he wasn’t) and the general desire of the Jewish state and priesthood (including Paul himself) to suppress him and his followers (to the point of banishing them from the Temple, which was tantamount to being exiled from the culture, all the way up to execution).

As far as I’m concerned, though, all this doesn’t force you to accept a certain set of facts about Jesus, particularly a set of facts that touches on something both unlikely and also fundamental to people’s interpretational structures (how they determine truth and meaning). Things like that aren’t shifted so easily by facts that operate closer to the surface of our minds. They require a massive adjustment to our whole nested structure of knowledge, value, and action. Even if they’re true, we may not easily be able to see or live as if they were true. Determinism and universal nihilism may be true, but accepting them and living as if they are true is notoriously difficult for humans.

It’s also the case that people do, in fact, convert. In fact virtually all of the writers of the new testament were converted Jews, and some were even quite faithful and pious Jews like Paul and very resistant to conversion. Jews took their religion much more seriously than the Romans or Greeks (and still do, as you can tell by the fact that it still exists and Roman and Greek religions, as well as states, faded from the world long ago). As for the the converts, both past and present, it isn’t exactly the facts that change their mind, because it isn’t anything so small. It’s the whole vision of reality. The whole map it lays in the world. The whole way that we characterize the landscape and navigate it.” The facts” are merely the notes and lines of a pencil in a particular corner of that map.

Christianity particularly is and has always been and has always been intended to be a faith of choice. You can’t be born into it. You don’t default into it. That’s a false faith. You have to choose it voluntarily. You come out of something else, somewhere else, and come into this kingdom. And that kingdom isn’t even centered, exactly, on a set of propositions. There is a set of propositions. But the center from which they flow is actually a person (or an idea of a person, if you like). It’s a personal faith. You invest your trust into the person of Christ. And by that means encounter the transpersonal (God) and are transformed for the better. And maybe the main problem with that is that you can’t find sufficient evidence to know or trust that person. That’s a real hurdle. But plenty of people get over it.

The main point is that you can’t solve the problem of faith in general and Christianity in particular by fussing about at the surface level of thought. And you can’t argue that it exists only on a level that is less real or less meaningful or less legitimate than questions about stock markets.

—

If I had to pick on thing to seriously disagree with Michael on, it’s whether we are actually getting better at controlling ourselves. I don’t think we are. I think we’ve gotten better at regulating rhe conditions and consequences around us. Maybe we did get better, slowly for a long time, and that eventually yielded power and confort. And those have taken the place, structurally, of our moral control.

We don’t need to have as much control or fortitude or stability now, because we’ve learned to control the environment. And we’ve become dependent on our ability to have the environment and the consequences of our lives being managed for us. So we face three terrible possibilities.

First, that our ability to control ourselves will degrade so much that we won’t be able to hold on to or wield the power over our conditions any more. Second, that the external structural environment will change in some way that exceeds our ability to control it, forcing us to rely on internal fortitude we no longer possess. Third, that we will degenerate morally to such a degree, in tandem with our increasing power over our circumstances, that we will wield that power for our own destruction.

It’s a bit like what happens when you go a couple generations down from some successful immigrant families. The first generation had to develop great character to survive despite harsh conditions. The second generation enjoyed better conditions plus the inherited character from their parents and had a massive advantage. The third generation never knew the harsh conditions, takes the good ones for granted, and never needed to develop the character to succeed outside them, and so they waste and spoil their advantages.

—

After being called a “dullard, sheep, child, and simian” by someone for writing the previous passages.

This is clearly one of those discussions that generates more heat than light. Resorting to repeated name calling won’t convince interlocutors of good faith of your position, only the easily cowed and duped.

I doubt it’s worth explaining, but the point isn’t that reason and logic are useless and there ain’t any way of analyzing or judging whether any particular frame is more or less valid or accurate (so go nuts and start using your crystal magic). It’s a question of what conceptual framework and language is most useful to use for a given subject.

Reason doesn’t work independently, it works within a given frame. And all language is essentially symbolic, metaphorical, and analogical, allowing creatures like us to address distant realities from within our framework of psychological experience. And while the language and constructions of math may be useful for describing the actions of say, physical objects, they may not be as relevant or useful for describing other kinds of actions, such as personal relationships, phenomenal experience, psychological experience, and so on. And the reverse also applies.

The question is, are narrative and personification a useful, natural, or accurate way for humans to describe the landscape of their existential experience? I think the answer, if you have any knowledge of people, is a resounding “Yes!” People live and feel and judge and act and operate primarily in the world of narrative (and narrative value).

The primary question we address in observing a bottle of wine isn’t “What is the wine bottle made from?” (though knowing that may be very useful in its production). The central question were confronting is, “What does this thing mean to me?” It’s something I want to drink, it’s of a certain shape and color that pleases me, its something I bought for a special occasion with my wife, it cost this much that I can afford because of where I am in my personal financial life, it has a certain flavor that seems pleasurable to me, I gained that taste through this personal history, I know how much I want to drink or not to drink for the optimal experience I want to have, the wine exists because of this historical story of how grapes and the trade came to that region, it was transported to where I could buy it because of this cultural story that I am part of.

There is just so, so much to that bottle, the main things that really mean something to me, that cannot be captured in a chemical formula, nor is the atomic or chemical structure part of what I directly observe or experience. These “secondary” elements of meaning and narrative are real and they are relevant. And when it comes to describing and prescribing and navigating human behavior, what you really have is not merely the chemical composition of a human, but all these levels of meaning.

The human brain is basically the most complicated object in existence, and the human mind is so complicated that we don’t really understand exactly how one arises from or relates to the other. And human narratives encompass the complexity of many minds and many meanings and purposes and values and uses and endeavors interacting with one another.

So it is not useless or inaccurate to attempt to describe the content of human experience in those terms (narrative, personification, purposes, meanings, story) that are closest and most central to the phenomena being described (human phenomenonal, psychological, and ideological experience) and that are the most complex and sophisticated representations of those phenomena (in this case, the phenomena being people and their activities).

The phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” comes to mind. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be better or worse pictures, more or less useful ones, more or less coherent pictures. But it is a way of saying that you shouldn’t underestimate the value of pictures, nor of the way in which people may actually be addressing and manipulating and understanding and acting on complex realities by means of their symbolic representation.

All thought, all language, is a kind of symbolic representation. And there are some types that, as I said, are actually nearer to the reality of and more representative of the complex realities of the underlying truths than some people are willing to recognize. I am the last person to underestimate the value of the great symbolic proposition that 1+1=2, but when used to describe a phenomenon such as, say, my marriage to my wife, it fails to exhaust the underlying meaning.

So, no, I don’t put much weight in the picture of reality that Deepak Chopra offers. Nor am I particularly impressed by those who entirely fail to see why the articulation of his narrative description of the world is so meaningful to so many people. It shows a lack of imagination and a very limited scope for the language of representation, an inability to understand the different terms by which people address different fields of human experience and endeavor. It is a shrinking of the world to fit a single perceptual and conceptual frame. Making the frame smaller may make the world seem coherent and comprehensible, by disallowing the analytical models of all others, but I think the resurgence of many diverse and contradictory, fragmenting worldviews (the postmodern explosion) is really a symptom of that failure.

Having been presented with a conceptual framework too small and limited and too distant from the actual content of human experience, people lost faith that it had anything meaningful to say to them and started seeking other gods, turning back to the pantheism and ideological isolation of the past.

People could sense that the reality of what life was was not being adequately captured and described by the intellectuals and cultural expressions around them. It wasn’t addressing the realities they experienced, or giving them knowledge enough to navigate the challenges of value, action, meaning, identity, purpose, of the narrative of their lives. So they started looking for someone who would. And so you get people like Deepak Chopra, who is addressing them at that level of primacy. And maybe he isn’t great. But people didn’t go looking for new solutions because what they had been offered was so perfect and useful and complete and they were just so dumb. They went looking because what they were offered was weak, distant, inadequate, irrelevant, simplistic, and useless.