These are the questionable ideas of Some New And Interesting Ways To Explore The Inner And Outer Sacred, the experience of God that lacks belief. Read them, interrogate them well and do not believe for one moment their rational or irrational import, nor consider their sacredness as anything other than what may be within you; nonetheless sense them and consider the experience implied by them. Each statement is a development from the last – the whole constitutes a changing journey that ends up in a different place from where we started.
1. God does not exist, nor is great; He did not create this world, nor the Universe in which this world exists, nor the complexity therein, nor did He cause biological speciation or any other phenomenon commonly thought to have its origin in Him.
2. These things exist and proceed not by result of Evolution, but merely as a stage in the long process of evolution: what is seen now in the structure of the Universe and the various species of the earth can be considered as a still image from a much longer film. The film will continue, thus what is seen today is temporary, and not a final result.
3. Can we say, then, that God is a Delusion? We cannot, for in view of the above two statements, we must also observe that belief in, and experience of, God currently is present in human culture, perception and sociality (where one million years ago our hominid ancestors lacked such notions), and we must therefore come to the conclusion that ‘God’ has evolved. Thus it is not advisable to label as delusional an evolved set of behaviours and experiences, with presumably certain selective pressures which have acted – and still act – upon our sociality, cultural expressions, neurology and internal perceptions to provide maximal fitness for us as a species.
4. We must therefore ask what those benefits and fitnesses are, what the selective pressures were, and where in our neurology can the circuitries and cortices that generate such experiences and beliefs be found. These are the thoughts of a scientist: to ask questions, not to pre-judge the discussion which such loaded terms as ‘delusion’.
5. If one were to report, for example, an experience of hearing the Most Holy Voice Of God to a priest, the priest may interrogate one, but ultimately come to the conclusion that ‘It was the Most Holy Voice Of God. Now shut up, get upon thy knees, and pray damn hard!’ If one were to report the same to a Dawkinsian atheist, one would surely hear words along the lines of ‘It was a delusion, now shut up.’ The debate as to the nature – and subjective meaning – of this experience is thus closed in both cases.
6. I have come to the (tentative and liable-to-change) conclusion that God does ‘exist’, for a given value of ‘exist’, and must realise that bivalent IS/NOT thinking must here be abandoned in favour of polyvalent IS/MAYBE/OTHER/NOT considerations in which the notion of a deity is considered valid for a given domain but not others, and in some domains might only be ‘maybe’ partially valid, for whatever reason.
7. A domain where God is not valid is Cosmology, another is Biology. But in evolutionary psychology, and the realm of the subjective experience, God ‘exists’ as a suite of evolved behaviours and perceptions. This idea generates, not final answers closed to further debate, but questions, open to debate, and a polyvalent view of any of the proposed answers means there is a range of definiteness we can ascribe to them.
8. Interestingly, Professor Dawkins is noted for his antipathy to polyvalency: God either exists or he does not. It goes without saying that so is Pope Benedict XVI. But such thinking is not sufficient to consider even historical scientific problems such as the electron. It is known that the electron exists: it has measurable effects, it has been observed in particle colliders, and it submits to quantum mechanical predictions. But in considering where a given electron might be at a given moment in time, how fast it might be moving or the amount of energy it might be carrying, we are reduced to considering probabilities. We might also consider chaos theory and emergent order in this regard. Crucially, neither Dawkinsian atheism nor religious dogmatism is sufficiently valent to consider some of the most important scientific questions of our day. How, then, can either system be trusted to provide an objective or scientific view of this universe?
9. The Christians often say ‘God is Love’. In a way, this might be viewed as a valid supposition, although not in the way Christians intend it. The notion of ‘God’ is indeed analogous to the notion of ‘Love’, and we may substitute ‘experience’ for ‘notion’ here and still maintain its validity.
10. Love is a suite of evolved experiences which have specific social, cultural and perceptive effects which aid in human procreation, kinship, sense of wellbeing and sociality. There is also an attendant mythology in our culture: Venus, Cupid, Romeo and Juliet, and so on, but while we are attached to the images, we do not literally believe them. We do not pray to Cupid for an arrow if we desire to be in love.
11. In the domain of Love, we are happy to accept both systems as valid, but in different domains. Evolution is how Love came to manifest, but Cupid’s arrow is the meaning and indeed an appropriate description of the experience. Love is polyvalent: it exists but it does not exist.
12. God does not have a Cupid’s arrow, nor does He emerge as an evolved set of behaviours. His evolution is denied by both the religious and the atheistic. Attempts to confer Love-like polyvalency onto His Sanctity causes controversy on every side: it challenges religions, naturally, but it also challenges our current conceptions of what science is. It leaves us unsettled: God should either exist and be judging us Upon High, Verily, or he should be wholly absent and utterly ignored in all discussion and debate. The alternative is too difficult to think about.
13. As humans we are thus asked to believe. Religions each offer a minimal experience of God by following the one approved Avatar, but at the cost of having to literally believe in something that is patently not objectively existent in order to sacredly inform one’s intellectual, moral and spiritual life. Atheism offers the freedom of belief, and the freedom of the construction of one’s one moral and intellectual sphere, but at the cost of any notions of spiritual experience, and also by selling science short through insisting that some questions may not be asked, that some experiences may not be considered as sane or as having validity. Note also that sanity is statistical.
14. There is no hope for religion. But there is hope for science and experience. Those who wish to experience subjective meaning are encouraged to explore this notion of God and report it through narrative, art, poetry and the like. Any results should be submitted to evolutionary psychologists who can use it to examine the selective pressures that caused God to emerge, while neurologists can continue to explore the promising lines of enquiry into where sacred sensations (God in other words) might be founded within the neurological structure of the brain. Preliminary experiments have suggested the pre-frontal cortex, but there is much else to explore.
15. I am an artist. It is part of my role in society to ask questions. It is part of a scientist’s role in society also to ask questions. No form of dogma or literal belief, whether religiously-inspired, politically-driven or atheistically-formulated, should be permitted be to prevent such questions being asked.
16. In consideration of the world’s sciences in regard to the question of God, it appears that neurotheology may be a significant advance in coming to provide possible answers, and, hopefully, further questions. Neurotheology is the study of correlations of neurological phenomena with subjective experiences of the sacred and hypotheses to explain these phenomena, and holds that sensations such as trance, enlightenment, ‘spirituality’, altered consciousness states, and indeed belief or non-belief in God, may be neurologically-founded. Initial experiments suggest the pre-frontal cortex of the human brain as an area of significance for further research. This has led to a significant question already: is there a ‘God gene’ that predisposes one to believe in an omnipresent deity?
17. In a consideration of the world’s sacred traditions, it appears that Vodoun religion of Benin and Haiti is the most advanced morally, intellectually, spiritually and scientifically. Whilst it literally believes in an eternal and distant God, and various lwa who intercede between this figure and humanity, it places a primacy upon experience, not faith. The primary goal of Vodoun is to invite through dancing, prayer and ceremony, one of the lwa to enter one’s body and manifest behaviour. The human becomes the lwa, though a true Vodoun practitioner probably wouldn’t put it that way.
18. A casual glance through the list of the major lwa of Vodoun reveals a remarkable similarity between them and psychological archetypes, both Jungian and non-Jungian. But whereas archetypes are to be considered intellectually, lwa are to be transformed into: living, animate archetypality.
19. The experiential focus of Vodoun also leads to a disarming frankness about human diversity. Homosexuality, for example, is not merely tolerated but joyfully included as another aspect of human nature, and there are lwa that are patrons of gay and lesbian people, of transgender people, and of people of other diverse lifestyles not generally accepted in the majority of the religious-morality-driven world. All praise, whilst we’re on the subject, to Erzulie Freda Dahomey, bel mamzel, fanm d’chans. Long may she continue to animate my gay soul.
20. Parallel traditions to Vodoun also are found in the Orisha of Nigeria and the Candomble of Brazil and Angola, but they are not as content about the naturalness of the diversity of human natures and behaviours. Some of these parallel traditions are openly homophobic.
21. What, then, might an experientially-focussed Vodoun divorced from the aspects of its literal belief in an omnipotent deity look like, and how would that be useful for the greater understanding of this cultural, neurological, social, evolved phenomenon that is called ‘God’? How would playing, experiencing, exploring this system, divorced from the hierarchy of Gods and lwa, and perhaps with a free-wheeling nature more akin to hunter-gatherer ritual idiosyncracy, positively contribute to the future of humanity?
22. Again, I am an artist: I leave it to the neurotheologists, quantum physicists, biologists and evolutionary psychologists to come up with the science. Another aspect of my job is to provide something that can be experienced. Thus I offer here the idea of a system of sacred experience, for the purposes of neurological play, subjective exploration of meaning, and for self- and cosmos-questioning, in a rational, irrational, scientific, subjective manner. This idea is wholly divorced from belief, and may be more adequately couched in the notion of metaphor of play.
23. This can be amusingly titled Some New And Interesting Ways To Explore The Inner And Outer Sacred. It is polyvalent, non-literal, experiential. It denies the existence of God whilst inviting that silent archetype into the soul. It guards against belief. It asks questions. It seeks meaning, and reports back to science with its findings. It seeks for humanity to understand this evolved suite of behaviours more clearly. Most importantly, it seeks. It damns all final, closed answers...
1. God does not exist, nor is great; He did not create this world, nor the Universe in which this world exists, nor the complexity therein, nor did He cause biological speciation or any other phenomenon commonly thought to have its origin in Him.
2. These things exist and proceed not by result of Evolution, but merely as a stage in the long process of evolution: what is seen now in the structure of the Universe and the various species of the earth can be considered as a still image from a much longer film. The film will continue, thus what is seen today is temporary, and not a final result.
3. Can we say, then, that God is a Delusion? We cannot, for in view of the above two statements, we must also observe that belief in, and experience of, God currently is present in human culture, perception and sociality (where one million years ago our hominid ancestors lacked such notions), and we must therefore come to the conclusion that ‘God’ has evolved. Thus it is not advisable to label as delusional an evolved set of behaviours and experiences, with presumably certain selective pressures which have acted – and still act – upon our sociality, cultural expressions, neurology and internal perceptions to provide maximal fitness for us as a species.
4. We must therefore ask what those benefits and fitnesses are, what the selective pressures were, and where in our neurology can the circuitries and cortices that generate such experiences and beliefs be found. These are the thoughts of a scientist: to ask questions, not to pre-judge the discussion which such loaded terms as ‘delusion’.
5. If one were to report, for example, an experience of hearing the Most Holy Voice Of God to a priest, the priest may interrogate one, but ultimately come to the conclusion that ‘It was the Most Holy Voice Of God. Now shut up, get upon thy knees, and pray damn hard!’ If one were to report the same to a Dawkinsian atheist, one would surely hear words along the lines of ‘It was a delusion, now shut up.’ The debate as to the nature – and subjective meaning – of this experience is thus closed in both cases.
6. I have come to the (tentative and liable-to-change) conclusion that God does ‘exist’, for a given value of ‘exist’, and must realise that bivalent IS/NOT thinking must here be abandoned in favour of polyvalent IS/MAYBE/OTHER/NOT considerations in which the notion of a deity is considered valid for a given domain but not others, and in some domains might only be ‘maybe’ partially valid, for whatever reason.
7. A domain where God is not valid is Cosmology, another is Biology. But in evolutionary psychology, and the realm of the subjective experience, God ‘exists’ as a suite of evolved behaviours and perceptions. This idea generates, not final answers closed to further debate, but questions, open to debate, and a polyvalent view of any of the proposed answers means there is a range of definiteness we can ascribe to them.
8. Interestingly, Professor Dawkins is noted for his antipathy to polyvalency: God either exists or he does not. It goes without saying that so is Pope Benedict XVI. But such thinking is not sufficient to consider even historical scientific problems such as the electron. It is known that the electron exists: it has measurable effects, it has been observed in particle colliders, and it submits to quantum mechanical predictions. But in considering where a given electron might be at a given moment in time, how fast it might be moving or the amount of energy it might be carrying, we are reduced to considering probabilities. We might also consider chaos theory and emergent order in this regard. Crucially, neither Dawkinsian atheism nor religious dogmatism is sufficiently valent to consider some of the most important scientific questions of our day. How, then, can either system be trusted to provide an objective or scientific view of this universe?
9. The Christians often say ‘God is Love’. In a way, this might be viewed as a valid supposition, although not in the way Christians intend it. The notion of ‘God’ is indeed analogous to the notion of ‘Love’, and we may substitute ‘experience’ for ‘notion’ here and still maintain its validity.
10. Love is a suite of evolved experiences which have specific social, cultural and perceptive effects which aid in human procreation, kinship, sense of wellbeing and sociality. There is also an attendant mythology in our culture: Venus, Cupid, Romeo and Juliet, and so on, but while we are attached to the images, we do not literally believe them. We do not pray to Cupid for an arrow if we desire to be in love.
11. In the domain of Love, we are happy to accept both systems as valid, but in different domains. Evolution is how Love came to manifest, but Cupid’s arrow is the meaning and indeed an appropriate description of the experience. Love is polyvalent: it exists but it does not exist.
12. God does not have a Cupid’s arrow, nor does He emerge as an evolved set of behaviours. His evolution is denied by both the religious and the atheistic. Attempts to confer Love-like polyvalency onto His Sanctity causes controversy on every side: it challenges religions, naturally, but it also challenges our current conceptions of what science is. It leaves us unsettled: God should either exist and be judging us Upon High, Verily, or he should be wholly absent and utterly ignored in all discussion and debate. The alternative is too difficult to think about.
13. As humans we are thus asked to believe. Religions each offer a minimal experience of God by following the one approved Avatar, but at the cost of having to literally believe in something that is patently not objectively existent in order to sacredly inform one’s intellectual, moral and spiritual life. Atheism offers the freedom of belief, and the freedom of the construction of one’s one moral and intellectual sphere, but at the cost of any notions of spiritual experience, and also by selling science short through insisting that some questions may not be asked, that some experiences may not be considered as sane or as having validity. Note also that sanity is statistical.
14. There is no hope for religion. But there is hope for science and experience. Those who wish to experience subjective meaning are encouraged to explore this notion of God and report it through narrative, art, poetry and the like. Any results should be submitted to evolutionary psychologists who can use it to examine the selective pressures that caused God to emerge, while neurologists can continue to explore the promising lines of enquiry into where sacred sensations (God in other words) might be founded within the neurological structure of the brain. Preliminary experiments have suggested the pre-frontal cortex, but there is much else to explore.
15. I am an artist. It is part of my role in society to ask questions. It is part of a scientist’s role in society also to ask questions. No form of dogma or literal belief, whether religiously-inspired, politically-driven or atheistically-formulated, should be permitted be to prevent such questions being asked.
16. In consideration of the world’s sciences in regard to the question of God, it appears that neurotheology may be a significant advance in coming to provide possible answers, and, hopefully, further questions. Neurotheology is the study of correlations of neurological phenomena with subjective experiences of the sacred and hypotheses to explain these phenomena, and holds that sensations such as trance, enlightenment, ‘spirituality’, altered consciousness states, and indeed belief or non-belief in God, may be neurologically-founded. Initial experiments suggest the pre-frontal cortex of the human brain as an area of significance for further research. This has led to a significant question already: is there a ‘God gene’ that predisposes one to believe in an omnipresent deity?
17. In a consideration of the world’s sacred traditions, it appears that Vodoun religion of Benin and Haiti is the most advanced morally, intellectually, spiritually and scientifically. Whilst it literally believes in an eternal and distant God, and various lwa who intercede between this figure and humanity, it places a primacy upon experience, not faith. The primary goal of Vodoun is to invite through dancing, prayer and ceremony, one of the lwa to enter one’s body and manifest behaviour. The human becomes the lwa, though a true Vodoun practitioner probably wouldn’t put it that way.
18. A casual glance through the list of the major lwa of Vodoun reveals a remarkable similarity between them and psychological archetypes, both Jungian and non-Jungian. But whereas archetypes are to be considered intellectually, lwa are to be transformed into: living, animate archetypality.
19. The experiential focus of Vodoun also leads to a disarming frankness about human diversity. Homosexuality, for example, is not merely tolerated but joyfully included as another aspect of human nature, and there are lwa that are patrons of gay and lesbian people, of transgender people, and of people of other diverse lifestyles not generally accepted in the majority of the religious-morality-driven world. All praise, whilst we’re on the subject, to Erzulie Freda Dahomey, bel mamzel, fanm d’chans. Long may she continue to animate my gay soul.
20. Parallel traditions to Vodoun also are found in the Orisha of Nigeria and the Candomble of Brazil and Angola, but they are not as content about the naturalness of the diversity of human natures and behaviours. Some of these parallel traditions are openly homophobic.
21. What, then, might an experientially-focussed Vodoun divorced from the aspects of its literal belief in an omnipotent deity look like, and how would that be useful for the greater understanding of this cultural, neurological, social, evolved phenomenon that is called ‘God’? How would playing, experiencing, exploring this system, divorced from the hierarchy of Gods and lwa, and perhaps with a free-wheeling nature more akin to hunter-gatherer ritual idiosyncracy, positively contribute to the future of humanity?
22. Again, I am an artist: I leave it to the neurotheologists, quantum physicists, biologists and evolutionary psychologists to come up with the science. Another aspect of my job is to provide something that can be experienced. Thus I offer here the idea of a system of sacred experience, for the purposes of neurological play, subjective exploration of meaning, and for self- and cosmos-questioning, in a rational, irrational, scientific, subjective manner. This idea is wholly divorced from belief, and may be more adequately couched in the notion of metaphor of play.
23. This can be amusingly titled Some New And Interesting Ways To Explore The Inner And Outer Sacred. It is polyvalent, non-literal, experiential. It denies the existence of God whilst inviting that silent archetype into the soul. It guards against belief. It asks questions. It seeks meaning, and reports back to science with its findings. It seeks for humanity to understand this evolved suite of behaviours more clearly. Most importantly, it seeks. It damns all final, closed answers...
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