An ongoing obsession

I've said much of this already, in slightly different ways, but I feel that I'm coming closer and closer to a proper synthesis of my whole notion for why God is a nonsense category.

Theism is predicated upon the concept of an immaterial mind that initiated the existence of matter through an act of volition, and that certain movements of matter, namely those actuated through the human limbic system and its associated manipulations of tools and crafting of artifacts, are also ultimately the results of immaterial minds ('souls', which haunt human bodies and somehow control and guide them). Mind, in order to have the truly sovereign existence that is supposed by theism, cannot itself be a manifestation of material processes -- otherwise it ceases to be self-actuating and becomes fused with, and constrained by, physics, which is the domain of the material. If matter is needed for mind to function, then this is to concede the materialist conception of mind, at least in its broad outline, and mind as independent Thing then loses its efficacy. When even a smidgen of matter is absorbed into mind's being, its status as the theist's Sovereign Agent, the 'source' of material existence as well as its ongoing driver (at least within the realm of human beings and their effects), is severely undermined. Indeed, the resident matter would itself need to be 'explained' through recourse to a purpose in the theistic narrative -- and purpose is of course something that in the theist's conception of the world emanates from mind; to allow matter into the equation would require an account for the processes and interactions that mind was partaking in to help mind achieve what it couldn't otherwise achieve by its unhindered self. This would hardly be the stuff of 'Pure Will', as God is often described. Brute purpose, in this scheme, is therefore the precedent and prerequisite component, and matter is the result. In this scheme, then, mind must divorce itself of all matter; mind is the original Origin, the source and the creative spark that breathed the universe into existence.

The scientific narrative is precisely the reverse of this: here, matter is the precedent and prerequisite and mind is the consequence. Mind is gradually built up over countless eons by increasingly sophisticated increments of biology; indeed, it is ultimately nothing more than a functional aspect of biology. This makes mind as the preceding ultimate cause for the universe both untenable and superfluous. Once primordial mind is shown to be superfluous, so too must primordial purpose (in the theistic sense, not in the Darwinian biological sense). Purpose, as we now understand, is itself an artifact of the universe, built up, refined, and ultimately represented in systems that are able to generate self-reflection (that is, in biological computers we call 'brains').

The primacy and sovereignty of mind is required by the narrative of theism if it is to count as a theism distinguishable from the mushy allusions often bandied about by half-believers who want to claim that God is 'oneness' or 'the universe'. But such pleadings carry nothing of import that would delineate such conceptions from a relabelling of the universe as ‘God’. This is emphatically not the type of entity that could act as a rational agent with a purpose-driven orientation capable of satisfying the emotional earnings that quite obviously lay just behind all this.

It is clear that raw matter cannot be 'inherently' intelligent; indeed, to designate it as such is to latch attributes of mind onto something that emphatically must lack those attributes by virtue of what we know about minds (and if the designation of mind is to mean anything at all in other contexts). Matter, in the materialist conception, can be smart, goal-oriented, even conscious, but only because it has achieved some form of organisation that endows it with the functionalities not seen at its basest levels. Again: to say that matter could ever be 'intrinsically' intelligent is to bestow it with attributes of a higher organisation of itself. The behaviour of matter at its rawest constituent level can only ever be 'dumb', and, in the theistic universe, in need of direction by a dynamic and freewheeling interloper if purpose is to enter the proceedings.

Some people, when they try to imagine what God is, suppose that that he might conceivably be composed of some 'God-stuff' - not the same as Pure Will, perhaps, but a sort of swirly, dynamic, morphing, wishy-washy something-or-other, ‘like air’ but endowed with extraordinary attributes (though lacking in definitive structure) that obey no constraints, operating by a physics beyond physics, as it were. But what, exactly, is this God-stuff imagined to be doing? Is it part of a sensory apparatus? Is it part of God's body (if he's imagined to have or need one)? But from whence does this God-stuff itself come? Would it not itself need to be part of the purpose-centric hierarchy of the theistic framework, and hence a consequence of Pure Will? And if Pure Will is so powerful that it could conjure the universe into existence, why does the primordial mind go through the trouble of kneeling and moulding some God-stuff in the first place? As alluded to earlier, what is the God-stuff doing that mind is not already capable of doing by itself (and which would then, notice, undermine the primacy of mind, now replaced with an acknowledgement of the centrality of systems? Indeed, it is mind that determines that there is a need for kneeling and moulding, but for what return?). Here you might notice also that we're zeroing in on a basic feature of mind: it cannot possibly be a unitary 'thing' but is something that must necessarily exist as an aspect of a changing, heterogeneous system. 'God-stuff', 'spiritual matter' or other such categories are mere face-saving placeholders for postponing an acknowledgement of the sorts of problems that a mind-first narrative instantiates. Since purpose is the driver in the mechanics of the theistic narrative, its pure, free-floating self must reign supreme, bestowed with its own motility and its own separate and inviolable existence. Matter is a dead-weight, an extra baggage that is at best superfluous to mind’s existence, but nevertheless necessary as a means to actuate its plans (i.e. the physical universe within which the arena of human life and all its trials and challenges take place).

Or perhaps God-stuff and Pure Will are fused in an evolutionary marriage, in which one reinforces and improves the other. Of course this undermines the theistic assumption of God as an unchanging, 'perfect', and all-powerful being (especially since it implies that God might at some point have been a bumbling idiot with nary the intellect of a mosquito), but more importantly it also suggests that the scenario of a universe arising from extremely simple beginnings, all by itself, is not nearly so formidably prohibitive as the theist would suppose. After all, if we're asked to imagine that an intelligent supreme being could evolve in this way, why not go the easier route and suppose that the universe evolved? Why go through the trouble of believing that a being evolved first and that the universe came afterwards when this scheme basically concedes that mind isn't the supreme driver anyway? Well, you can see how these types of formulations are rather vapid, designed to placate believers in things that they have no justification believing in the first place. But that's precisely the point, for these are the most reasonable formulations of what a supreme being could be, and even here they fail.

The materialist and idealist formulations both acknowledge that matter, once properly arranged, can exhibit behaviours reminiscent of intelligence. For example, a machine can be programmed to respond to a wide range of stimuli with a great deal of sophistication, showing dynamism and adaptability. But, crucially, it is only when we get to these sorts of higher levels of organisation that matter can become dynamic in its behaviour, to more and more closely approximate intelligence. Where the idealist and materialist formulations part company, however, is in saying where 'true' intelligence and dynamism come into play. The materialist, unlike the idealist, would say that true intelligence can be achieved by appropriately organised matter, albeit of staggering complexity. The idealist would say that true intelligence is only the preserve of some 'immaterial' domain, which reaches into and effects the material world. But we have seen that this can not possibly work.

When a theist talks about free will, they are again taking a philosophical idealist stand on things, positing that there is something that exists independently of matter and that is not constrained by it. If they were to posit a system composed of various parts interacting with each other as well as the inputs and effects of some environment, and which together result in an actuator for moral decisions and all that that entails, then they are no longer talking about free will and moral decision-making in the manner that they currently conceive of it; they are in fact reversing the proceedings in an important philosophical sense, for they want (and, to sustain their viewpoint, need) a notion of human action, minds and God that does away with any talk of component parts and leaves the 'purposeful' as an independently existing thing in itself, as a self-actuating, irreducible driver. That's the essential difference between an idealist viewpoint and an authentically materialist one. When they talk about God, theists are talking about a being that is not reducible in any way whatsoever; they mean to say a being that embodies, or IS, the 'Reason' for the universe's existence; 'Reason' or 'Purpose' or 'Goal' is taken to be a basis for, not a result of, the physical world. The manner in which the universe was supposed to have been brought about by God is through 'Pure will' (the Bible talks about 'the Word'); they mean to say a being which IS, in the ultimate sense, 'Purpose', and that this purpose is itself the locomotive force that drove the universe into existence. For this being, in its basic constitution, to be part of a physical framework is inadequate, because that framework violates the precedence of the pure agency that God is supposed to be. What theists hanker for (and think they get with their religion) is an entity that embodies unadulterated, stand-alone, free-wheeling intellect/morality/will, existing in its own realm. In other words, Mind, Idea, Will and Purpose are here independent, fundamental, eternal categories. Theism is thus a thoroughly, died-in-the-wool, irredeemably idealist viewpoint, and necessarily fatally flawed because of it.

Pure Will, and therefore God, are mere linguistic tricks. This understanding comes from a simple consideration of what a thought is: a representation of a thing. The thought isn't the thing being represented. If physical reality is imagined to have come about through volition, that volition must itself have been composed of thoughts ('I am going to do this' and 'I am going to actualise this thing I'm imagining') - that is, of representations. But no matter how 'pure' it is, volition cannot not act as a standalone feature of existence. Unless it is a functional aspect of a physical system, it can have no interaction with the physical world. We humans cannot will something into existence; for example, a car will never materialise at the other end of a wish, no matter how powerfully we may hope for it, unless we also exert some mechanical effect on the world that involves the rearrangement of various configurations of matter. And the representation of the car can only exist because we have the requisite sensory apparatus to receive the photons that bounce off the car, or of a description of it printed on paper or displayed on computer screen. God has no such sensory apparatus, for he is imagined to be a disembodied, immaterial mind. If humans cannot will something like a car to exist, how then does a 'being' that lacks even the attribute of physicality fare any better? How does the attribute of 'purity' - in this case meaning the absence of a material constitution - make 'will' more powerful? What exactly is Godly 'power' but a misappropriation of the nature of mind?

It's supremely ironic that theism posits something that has an inverse relationship to the attributes required for it to exist. For a being to be able to will at all, it needs to be superbly complex - that is, to exhibit more physical interactions than an entity of lesser ability to will. The less complex, the less can it represent anything and exhibit intentionality. But theists simply want to yank out the effect (will, intentionality, and consciousness) and place it at the beginning. This is an absolutely clear category violation. The notion that it is possible to cross the gap from some separate realm of abstract representation to the realm of actual stuff makes intuitive, naive sense, but closer scrutiny will reveal that such notions are folk-psychology, not thought-out premises.

When one gets the hang of thinking of the world in terms of concepts, rather than immaterial ideas, of processes rather than Platonic essences, of cumulative change rather than intelligent design -- that is, when one adopts the Darwinian, computational and materialist insights and takes on board their philosophical import -- the religious view is exposed as linguistic nonsense and duly evaporates. Theism explains nothing, because its basic precepts are blatant misappropriations.

Quotes

Quotes from nobeliefs.com


No amount of belief makes something a fact.

--James Randi


The day that you stop looking -- because you're content God did it -- I don't need you in the lab. You're useless on the frontier of understanding the nature of the world.

--Neil Degrasse Tyson


We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.

--Sam Harris


The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd except to be made by a species that's about a half chromosome away from being a chimpanzee.

--Christopher Hitchens (Hitchens debates Barry Brummett)


If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

--Thomas Szasz (professor of psychiatry)


Atheism is the arrogant belief that the entire universe was not created for our benefit.

--Michael Nugent (responding to the question of why atheists are so arrogant.)



The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence, whereas insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence.

--William Harwood: Dictionary of Contemporary Mythology, London, 1st Books, 2002


People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They re far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.

--Isaac Asimov


If all atheists left the USA, it would lose 93% of the National Academy of Sciences but less than 1% of the prison population.

--via TweetDeck


God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time goes on.

--Neil DeGrasse Tyson


For God’s sake, even the scientists are trying to find ways and means to improve the human conditions on this earth. Such as curing diseases, even conquering death. Now we are told that scientists are playing God. Well, if God would only stop wasting his powers fooling around and begin to play the role of God himself, we would have no need of scientists trying hard to make this world a better place than what the religious morons have made of it during these past centuries!

--Poch Suzara


Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here today.

--Lawrence Krauss (A Universe From Nothing)


Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.

--Arthur Schopenhauer


As I once put it to theologians at a meeting at the Vatican: theologians have to listen to scientists, because if they want to try to create a consistent theology (and while I have opinions about whether this is possible, but my opinions about this are neither particularly important nor informed) they at least need to know how the world works. But scientists don't have to listen to theologians, because it has no effect whatsoever on the scientific process.

--Lawrence Krauss (Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith?)


An idea does not gain truth as it gains followers.

--Amanda Bloom


A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

--Saul Bellow


If this is your God, he’s not very impressive. He has so many psychological problems; he’s so insecure. He demands worship every seven days. He goes out and creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes. He’s a pretty poor excuse for a Supreme Being.

--Gene Roddenberry