Thread: The Teleological Mind

To expatiate:

In order to withstand the hardships of life, people need aims so that at least their journey will have meaning even if the goal is not ultimately met. We carry a lot more information in our minds than we are aware of so each and every one of us has great potential. We don't know what we are capable of until we try something new and venture into the unknown. Artists are mediators between the unknown world of the unconscious and the certainties of the conscious world. The ill mind doesn't act out what it dreams, which is reflective of the unconscious, but it does act out what it does not dream which are norms imposed upon us. Dire consequences are more likely to occur when the shadow archetype remains ignored, repressed or unaddressed for a long time. It is the healthy mind which integrates all its contradictions, becoming aware of the shadow aspect of ourselves and heeding our conscience.

Without the idea of God, humanity will painfully fluctuate between nihilism and extreme ideologies arising from an indelible religious substrate characteristic of human nature. Nietzsche saw that the metaphorical 'death of God' was catastrophic prior to WWII and he believed humanity needed to devise values afresh as a replacement where we model ourselves to the ideal of a Superman (Übermensch). But what the German philosopher saw as a solution was misconstrued by the Nazis, who devised a hideous ideology where the head of state is dangerously deemed to be a godlike figure unanswerable to anyone or any one law. Jung was both an admirer and critic of Nietzsche, seeing the problem as something deeper from the psychoanalytical perspective which he had initially learned from Freud—where the unconscious exerts a powerful influence on people as we are internally comprised of living sub-personalities making us act out the way we do and often with regret.

Originally Posted by Summerlander

THE TELEOLOGICAL MIND

In other words, objective observations inform us that we do not live in a teleological universe. But does this mean that purpose doesn't exist in the universe? Not quite. If we look at lifeforms, we can tell that they strive to survive, generally having the purpose to live long enough to procreate and pass on their genes. And without being anthropocentric, we can tell that people create meaning and purpose, which, if aligned with their interests and wellbeing, will bode well for them because, pragmatically, what is meaningful to them is true enough.
...
The word 'God’ is too broad a term to define anything concrete, by the way. If you are hoping to find evidence of a creator of the universe, forget it. .

Creation implies a creator. If someone wishes to anthropomorphize from there I haven't got a big problem with it.
Intelligent Design seems plainly obvious to the casual observer.

I lean towards fatalism so the universe is mostly meaningless, but it is not without Purpose. Though, we have to work at giving it purpose... which means most of us aren't very good at it, given the almost universal laziness extant.

I agree that to the casual observer things appear to be intelligently designed. It's not until we come to understand Darwinism that we see the naturally selective 'blind watchmaker' that the ethologist Richard Dawkins was talking about.

As Douglas Adams once conveyed in his lake metaphor, a conscious lake would believe itself to have been specially designed for the crater in which it sits and vice versa—that the crater was tailor-made for it.

And you are right. We have to create purpose to make life worth living and that can be hard. It is hard to be responsible. Chaos comes easier and order requires effort.

Creation implies a creator.

Atheism is irrational.
Ipso facto, atheists would do well to stop pretending that they have a lock on this one.

Dennis Prager didn't just take Dawkins down a peg but blew him off the stage. Atheists are still reeling. No cogent response has been proffered, that I know of. That's not to say they did not gather in their saferooms and echo-chambers to reinforce each other's belief systems with their tired, old atheist orthodoxy.
(I personally have a minor nit-pick with the Prager arguments but overall the atheists were handily defeated).

True Seekers can search "major flaws in Darwinism" if they feel so inclined.

I'm not familiar with Dennis Prager but seen as you've mentioned him, I'm willing to check him out. I will definitely have to listen to articulated counterarguments against atheism and Darwinism from the horse's mouth.

But feel free to unpack for me why you believe atheism is irrational and perhaps what you think of anti-Prager articles such as this one:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2016/...ls-on-atheism/

Sorry but on such short notice that's the first thing that stuck out to me. Why do you think atheists cannot conceive of rectitude without God? And how do you reconcile a benevolent Creator of the universe—who is obviously responsible for the invention of mathematics and morality—with your brand of fatalism.

I eagerly await an elaboration ...

I have already stated twice why atheism is irrational.
I do not think atheists cannot conceive of rectitude without God. I did not say anything close to that.
I never said that the Creator is benevolent. Easily half of creation is anything but.... This much is plainly obvious to the casual observer. {Although I understand the "all loving and all merciful God" fan club... immersed in deep denial as a coping mechanism.... I ain't gonna shake their tree until I have something better to offer.}
I am presently toying with the notion that mathematics is the first thing the creator had to create. The rest inevitably followed.
Morality is a different can of worms.

And as for the anti-Prager link you pointed to...
Wow. What a pitiful mess.
It begins with;
"Dennis Prager blames all American ills on atheism"
No, he doesn't.
It gets worse from there. He quotes a list of accurate statements from Prager and he dismisses them out of hand with little more than the Progressive attitude that 2+2=5 whenever Progressives say it does. Its a joke of a non-rebuttal. Our schools aren't just failing but they are imploding before our very eyes. 25 years ago the complaint was that "Johnny can't read" and the inequality in our schools was unconscionable. Today Progressives rejoice in how much things have improved because now Susie can't read either.
It's a joke.

Interesting take, Labyrinthus.

It may be the case that morality is entirely predicated on human experience; in other words, moral philosophy as a work in progress is wholly anthropocentric, in the interests of the majority as a collective mindset which inevitably has a massive influence on the individual but to a lesser degree on the psychopath.

There are many dilemmas in moral philosophy which rear their ugly heads when we are confronted with contexts that would force anybody who aspires to do good into a deontological pause and disorientation.

But mathematics, despite its complexity, seems more obviously fundamental to me, too. Take a few basic maths axioms and you can imagine possible extrapolations far more grounded in certainty and easily applicable to the world itself than theorised ethics devised by humans—the latter is just not as straight forward.

There is a particular talk between Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson which I'm willing to listen to given the time (it's just under an hour long). The current state of affairs of our education system is something that concerns me, too, making me pity this generation and the next.

I'm getting a clearer picture of your world view, now. Would it be fair to characterise you as neither an atheist nor a theist, but rather more appropriately, as subscribing to a fatalistic deism? How do you imagine a creator of the universe might be like?

The Deist part is close but the fatalism is only recognized as a de facto condition arising from the pervasive laziness amongst humanity. There is free will but it requires huge effort to exercise it. That means almost no one bothers. The default destiny unfolds the vast majority of the time.

I have a strong desire to know Truth but issues of morality are running a distant second to understanding Eternity and the Creator right now.

Certainly mathematics is fundamental... because the Creator made it that way. Even more fundamental is the creation of some sort of Mind that could postulate the first point in the midst of complete nothingness. Math is a mentation that requires a thinker to generate. Thoughts are incapable of describing the Creator any more than a clay pot can comprehend the potter at the wheel.

Addendum; I also wanted to mention that scientists and philosophers who aren't neurotically attached to Darwinism admit that Intelligent Design has merit when the inexplicable and mathematically/statistically impossible complexity of the universe is honestly considered.
"Gerd Müller notes evolution doesn’t adequately explain life’s origins or complexity"

These sorts of admissions are not new. The problems with Darwinism have been noted in the literature for quite a few years now. Those who still cling to Darwinism aren't even trying to face facts. They have an irrational attachment to their atheist ideology and will not be moved.

Not only does this brash generation lack the will and responsibility, youngsters are feckless and confused about discerning the wheat from the chaff. We don't see eye to eye on what is true and best for us as a society and this would be sure to last for decades to come after a few geniuses successfully winnowing out misinformation. And self-interest is always in danger of trumping communal welfare! It has been argued that human beings evolved to win arguments regardless of whether their stances are right or wrong. For instance, most polemics against pollution harp on about carbon emissions but seldom mention that the level of atmospheric concentrations of methane—a powerful greenhouse gas which is shorter-lived than carbon dioxide but 28 times more potent—is rising exponentially.

To make matters worse, people are discredited and stigmatised for having been wrong at least once—believing ethos is the most important mode of persuasion and that once a statement is made, it must not be retracted even if impugned. It's not, or shouldn't be, horrible to be wrong. It's part of a heuristic process that we all go through—trial and error or learning from our mistakes. In analytical psychology, Carl Jung spoke of the Trickster or clown archetype—the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland or the circus clown that fumbles about and fails at juggling but makes children laugh. The lesson here is that the clown represents the first attempt and therefore the first stage in the learning process. To err is human and it shows us what not to do if we want to get something right.

Thoughts are incapable of describing the Creator any more than a clay pot can comprehend the potter at the wheel.

I like the analogy, Labyrinthus! It's philosophically powerful. There is also a strange hypothesis postulating that if we were to understand reality all the way to its roots, reality would automatically get weirder and far more complex. Some say it has already happened way before the conception of the wave-particle duality and not necessarily caused by human observers.

"Gerd Müller notes evolution doesn’t adequately explain life’s origins or complexity"

I'm not sure Müller would deny evolution outright. I remember reading about his work a while ago. If I'm not mistaken, he's delved into epigenetics and propounds the possibility for other theories such as neo-Lamarckism to fill in the gaps. It's certainly plausible that Darwinism is not all it's cracked up to be and evolutionary biology is still a science in its infancy especially when we are dealing with billions of years of cause-and-effect apropos of carbon-based molecules. I'm not even sure we'll ever be able to fully comprehend abiogenesis, but then again, I'm not an expert.

Would you say you Creator has nothing to do with the Telos as defined by the likes of Cicero—that which resides at the summit of our hierarchy of values (an imagined ideal by humans or, as Plato would posit, a metaphysical reality by necessity)?

Originally Posted by Summerlander

Not only does this brash generation lack the will and responsibility, youngsters are feckless and confused about discerning the wheat from the chaff. We don't see eye to eye on what is true and best for us as a society and this would be sure to last for decades to come after a few geniuses successfully winnowing out misinformation. And self-interest is always in danger of trumping communal welfare! It has been argued that human beings evolved to win arguments regardless of whether their stances are right or wrong. For instance, most polemics against pollution harp on about carbon emissions but seldom mention that the level of atmospheric concentrations of methane—a powerful greenhouse gas which is shorter-lived than carbon dioxide but 28 times more potent—is rising exponentially.
[....]
Would you say you Creator has nothing to do with the Telos as defined by the likes of Cicero—that which resides at the summit of our hierarchy of values (an imagined ideal by humans or, as Plato would posit, a metaphysical reality by necessity)?

The really brain dead part of the idiot obsession with Carbon emissions is that the 2020 COVID shutdowns collapsed the human contribution of CO2 into the atmosphere -- down to to a fraction of the previous year's amount. Guess what happened to the inexorable, decades long climb in atmospheric CO2 concentrations on the trend chart? ...
...
Nothing. Absolutely NOTHING! The rising CO2 concentration in the atmosphere kept climbing at essentially the exact same rate that it has always been on.
In other words, Human activity has almost nothing to do with the observed rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

Getting the billions of mindless ruminants masquerading as conscious beings to recognize this and act accordingly is apparently a bridge too far.

As far as Telos and the Creator go it sounds like you are trying to put the cart before the horse. Creation is finished. What's done is done.

That's what I thought, Labyrinthus.

The creative principle of the universe, be that your mathematical creator or the god of Spinoza, is one that is far more plausible and has nothing to do with the god of miracles who interferes in human affairs that the majority of theists adhering to the Abrahamic religions believe. The creator implied by deism merely come up with the creative principle from which everything else naturally followed regardless of the fatalities such process might beget. It would explain why nature produces more mindless ruminants than super geniuses.

Your mathematical creator is also to be differentiated from the Telos, a product of human mentation as we can't help but imagine an ideal which is not a means to anything else but to which all else is a means. The latter, which many have come to call 'God', is only a psychological product with great pragmatic influence on our actions. It's not a manifest external being that cares about human beings and their conduct. It is merely an ideal we can observe in our minds.

Notice how the Serenity Prayer is a mental reminder for the need to discern the elements of our reality with wisdom, in particular, this excerpt:

'God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.'

~Reinhold Niebuhr

Well, as I have come to understand it, the Creator is not necessarily all that mathematical. Creation is.

I have read a bit of the ideas expressed by the Kabbalists as well as the Early Christian Fathers and Aquinas and the founders of various monastic orders, etc. The concept of God and the understanding of individuals within any given belief system varies widely, to put it mildly. Even the Greek philosophers commented on how the childish descriptions of the gods on Mount Olympus were pabulum for the ignorant masses. Nobody has a lock on the truth concerning the unknowable, not even the arrogant atheists. The atheist's argument is really pretty silly. "Hey, if your description of God doesn't meet my criteria I am just going to say there is no god, and I am going to keep saying that till you satisfy me... and your mother wears army boots!". Their entire position comes across as lazy and stupid, at best.

I have been exploring various states of consciousness for several decades now and in the early days, before I learned direct projection techniques I would have spontaneous subtle, inner experiences. I had never heard of the term "Lucid" connected with dreaming but I had plenty of lucid dreams. Back around 1975 there were no books on astral projection that I knew of, but I got the vibrations and just "popped" over into another world during meditation one night. I saw things that reminded me of the "burning bush" and I saw forms of what I think people call "angels". I was at a book discussion and someone told me that angels weren't real. He said he could make them come and go in his lucid dreams and that proved to him that they weren't real. I laughed and said that "just because you can make a model with mashed potatoes doesn't mean that there isn't a real physical place called Devil's Tower in Wyoming". He would say, "the Devil isn't real" and I just thought, "fine" and left it at that.

People have the right to describe their subtle experiences any way they like. I ain't gonna lose any sleep over it. If somebody's belief system resonates with a bunch of people who want to buy into it, fine. No big deal. If some partypooper naysayers want to claim "your belief system only causes war and misery" ... *now* I got a problem with it. The delusional partypoopers are the biggest mass murderers of the 20th century but somehow they try to claim the high moral ground and look down their arrogant noses at everyone else. Go figure....

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Originally Posted by Summerlander

As Douglas Adams once conveyed in his lake metaphor, a conscious lake would believe itself to have been specially designed for the crater in which it sits and vice versa—that the crater was tailor-made for it.

I now suspect that if the lake were truly conscious there is a fair chance the belief might be true.

I hope this Star Trek DS9 link can be active;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Env5DPtZylo

The universe is fundamentally mathematical. Why this should be is a mystery. Perhaps it couldn't be any other way and I'm not about to surmise any further with my limited human mind. But I'm pretty certain that knowing the Yin well casts a good light on the Yang, bringing the coniunctio (conjunction of opposites) into perspective; you cannot know one without the other! This is beautifully conveyed in the horror series Midnight Mass which mentions the Serenity Prayer.

Carl Jung once said that the reason why people don't find God is due to the fact that they don't venture deep enough into the abyss; everybody is scared of appraising the Devil! Evil is only 'dark' in the sense that we'd like it to remain in the dark. Evil is quite obvious in fact, and if we come to conceptualise it (the day we meet our Shadow), we will find that it is quite enlightening because then we will come to know what has truly been hidden from our purview all along: God. You must know hell in order to appreciate the 'light'.

Mythological fables about gods and their archetypal representations are entirely inspired by human experience—which doesn't just entail waking life! When the realm of the deep unconscious finds expression in dreams and psychedelic visions, we catch a glimpse of that holistic language. It shouldn't surprise us that the idea of God was born long ago. It is not a coincidence that one can become a god, with alacrity and to one's reverie, in lucid dreams.

Anyone can tell me angels aren't real all they like. But my experience, however subjectively biased, tells me otherwise! And I'm not talking about winged hooded figures I've happened upon or summoned whilst lucid dreaming (although it can also be said that anything that makes an appearance in the field of consciousness has its own reality). I'm talking about my wife, my Earth angel. She is manifestly angelic and tangible. Not only is she phenomenally real to me, she is, as far as I can tell, made of flesh and blood.

The Star Trek link was active. I just witnessed the groom's poignant farewell.

By the way, have you ever come across the recorded last words of Thomas Aquinas just before he died?

I like the "famous last words" stories.
Martin Luther; I wish I hadn't been so extreme.
Pancho Villa; Tell them I said something profound.

The Aquinas story is rather wordy. What part do you like?

The Jung story is intriguing. I read one story about how he met a recently departed friend in a dream after the funeral and the friend took him to his home and directed him to a book that he knew Jung had been looking for, on a high shelf in his library at home. Jung went to the friend's home the next day and the wife invited him in and said he could browse the books. Jung went straight to the high shelf where the book was in the "dream" and there the book was, exactly as he saw it in the dream. The wife let him keep it.

I have had many OBEs but none with this sort of solid connection to physical reality.

I must say that for me the last words of Pancho Villa are the most revealing ... Certainly revealing of his character but also of something quite profoundly human which expresses a desire for recognition or, in the least, wanting to be remembered for something.

The part I like the most about the story of Aquinas is literally his last days in France, expressing his opinions on the Canticles and finally uttering his last intriguing words. I came across them in Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology by Jung's colleague and friend Marie-Louise von Franz, in a chapter about the Aurora Consurgens which was published in the '60s with Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis.

It is an interesting read and which points out many references to the psychological process of individuation in wisdom literature. Franz suggests that Aquinas underwent some sort of breakthrough trance shortly before his death which was revelatory of the unconscious mind. His last words paraphrased Biblical verses and described a vision that alludes to a mystical marriage between the Anima and the Animus or the coniunctio in harmony. The book is sitting on my shelf in the living room and, as soon as I can be bothered, I will post here what the Aristotelian Saint said before he popped his clogs ...

Jung is even more intriguing and far more interesting to me than Freud or Adler. He certainly seemed to have precognitive visions in the form of dreams and many Jungians believe he predicted the Great War with a prophetic dream about—in his own words—'a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps' and 'mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands' followed by the whole sea turning to blood. Jung was also a spy for a precursor of the CIA who wanted him to psychologically profile Adolf Hitler.

To my knowledge I have never had prophetic dreams that have coincided with subsequent calamities but, in well over a decade of serious practice with out-of-body experiences and lucid dreaming, I have had at least one OOBE which could be construed as precognitive (event happened two weeks later involving a biker crashing into my neighbour's vehicle) and a few 'telephathic' OOBEs where I have seemingly 'visited' people living a myriad miles away from me and saw what was on their minds at the time rather than where they were physically.

All of the visited confirmed my experiences with astonishment, making me consider Michael Persinger's hypothesis of quantum entanglement of minds within the geomagnetic field as much as confirmation bias and eager associations. But I am a sceptic at heart and sit on the fence about many of these things. Even Jung, at the time of his prophetic dream about the war had just fallen out with Freud and it is thus hard to tell where the personal ends and the collective begins. But such awe-inspiring experiences do happen ...

How long have you been practicing?

I remember reading a story of how Aquinas was sitting in the pews after mass one Sunday and he did not move for a couple hours. He just sat there quietly keeping to himself and his companions were starting to get a little worried. He then explained to them that he had experienced a revelation and that he would not be writing any more. His Summa Theologica was not complete but he said he was done with it.
Years later on his deathbed he is said to have described his extremely popular writings as "bits of straw". A rather large discourse is reported to have been delivered but too much of it sounded heavily editorialized to my ears.

I started my "practice" in a Westernized School of an Eastern Path back in the 1970's and in the last 15 years I have dabbled in a couple Western traditions but for the most part nothing really "works" in terms of returning to the heart of the Creator, though delusional true believers are easy to find.

That's right! According to Franz, Thomas Aquinas had an 'immediate religious experience of the unconscious' which inspired the Aurora Consurgens (Rising Dawn). Such insightful experiences are not to be confused with psychotic breakdowns and have a lot more in common with satori and kenshō in Japanese Buddhism. Upon reading the text, however, one might see why it might be construed as a schizophrenic product. Undoubtedly, Aquinas must have undergone a period where he might have been overwhelmed by his unconscious, perhaps a psychotic episode.

As his friend Reginald of Piperno once observed on a particular occasion when the friar returned unusually pallid from the Mass and pushed aside his Summa and writing utensils to sit at his desk in a catatonic state with his head in his hands the whole day: 'I thought he had become crazy.' In the days that followed, Aquinas said he couldn't write for everything he had written seemed to him to be like palea sunt (straw). He saw his death coming prior to giving a seminar on the Song of Solomon at the Santa Maria di Fossa Nuova monastery, during which he died interpreting the words, 'Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field.' The Aurora Consurgens might indeed have originated in the notes of St. Thomas Aquinas's last seminar.

In context with the psychical and revelatory episode of Aquinas, it is said that the Logos represents the structural element of the unconscious—structure and meaning—while in the feminine qualification there is more the idea of its pictorial, emotional manifestation. The Wisdom of God tends to come in the archetypal form of Sapientia or Sophia, mother of the wise, or the anima Christi (soul of Christ).

In terms of 'returning to the heart of the Creator', have you ever tried to meet God or the Devil through lucid dreaming? This might sound chucklesome, but I'm talking about ways of exploring one's mind and its concepts, especially searching for deeply ingrained archetypes at the core of mental complexes just to see what comes to the surface and inspiring a journal à la Carl Jung's The Red Book: Liber Novus. And I see what you mean about delusion. At least you have dabbled here and there, which is more than I can say for myself. I still practise mindfulness and sometimes Dzogchen meditation but I tend to stick to what I know best, which is, lucid dreaming.

To me the delusional part is the indoctrination and how the initiates buy into the entire scheme even though the objective evidence right in front of their noses remains a constant reminder of their lack of success. But none of that mattered because the Organization bestowed upon them this exalted Initiation which means they must really being doing good.

I have certainly done more than dabble. At the beginning I spent five years meditating about one hour every day, practicing the proper mantras, fasting, doing the "presence" exercises throughout the day (kinda like Mindfulness), keeping a journal, etc. After five years I began to feel a little disappointment at the lack of progress but I thought maybe I am a little slow and just need to work a little longer. Ten years later I was definitely beginning to get cynical. I fell into a "what's the use" doldrum and my discipline suffered badly.

I am not saying that I was making no progress. My friends were generally blown away by my OOBE's and "dreams" and were speechless. I would lament how poorly I had done on some exercise and they would observe that most of them would sacrifice a lot to enjoy the sort of failure I had.

I went through a long period where nearly every dream was lucid. But my goal was to enter the heart of the Creator, so every day this did not happen was another failure. One night I did a full conscious projection and went off on yet another exploration in search of a Teaching Master who might toss me a useful scrap. Lo and behold I came upon a place where some event put on by my first School was going on and there was the Master standing right out front. I went up to him and he actually looked at me and recognized my presence. I asked him if he could help me get better at projection and he gave me directions to a place nearby where good instruction could be found. My normal reaction would be to immediately fly off to the location suggested but I paused and just as an afterthought almost, I said I wanted to have a good look at his aura. He surprisingly acquiesced. I floated in front of him and ... well, long story short the most awesome Spiritual experience I have ever had unfolded. There were waves of intensity that were growing beyond comprehension and I backed out at one point for fear that I would go insane and my family would find a babbling idiot in my room the next day. Then, to my surprise I returned not to my body but to the place where I was floating in front of the Master and I simply flew off to the building he gave me directions to. There I had another experience which was awesome enough in its own right.

Its been suggested that I might be happier if I lowered my expectations a little.

Interesting spiritual experiences which I believe unlock what lies in the deepest recesses of the mind. Such experiences can bring about epiphanies which leave one wondering if on some level the ostensible and subsequently ineffable revelation was known all along. It's an open question which inspires a number of possible answers depending on who you ask.

For Iain McGilchrist, it's a matter of the reductionist left hemisphere getting to know the holistic right. It shouldn't surprise us that a split-brained patient answers 'yes' and 'no' to the question 'Do you believe in God?' depending on which brain hemisphere is asked. The left hemisphere, in its approach to reality, does not see God manifest anywhere because all it can fathom are things reduced to definitions limited by what they are not. The right hemisphere will say that everything exists and can philosophically delineate how they do so; it can argue that anything that can potentially emerge in consciousness exists because mental appearances are, by definition, valid representations of such concepts.

'The existence of this cosmos can be fully explained only on the assumption that it is middling in every way—a vast Walpurgisnacht of mediocrity. Even its infinity is a middling one, since the infinite cosmos still falls infinitely short of achieving utter plenitude. It is like a randomly chosen subset of the natural numbers, a subset that includes infinitely many numbers but also leaves infinitely many numbers out.'

~Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?—An Existential Detective Story

I read this book by Holt three years ago and I couldn't help but notice the nihilism and godlessness implied by it so I'm interested in your take on it. How do you reconcile this quote with your premise that creation implies a creator? The book explores quantum theory as a candidate for justifying the inevitable existence of the universe by pretty much declaring that nothingness at the subatomic level is such an astronomical improbability as to render it impossible by human standards, so no godly hand required. It also argues that if a creator is behind it, such being would have to be extremely incompetent or simply indifferent—or perhaps one that allowed everything to experimentally unfold given the parameters.

Counterarguments here could hinge on a creator wanting its creation to unfold like a story moving from entropy to predictability or, to put it in layman's terms, chaos towards order and for its sentient beings to make meaningful effort in order to learn virtue and other metaphysical gems. Of course, this resides in the realm of conjecture. However, if any of us wants to succeed in life, and in order for life to be worth living, we must have purpose with a strong sense of right and wrong and walk a teleological path; for this reason, and as much as this sounds like an antinomy, even the humanistic atheist acts as though he or she believes in God.

There were waves of intensity that were growing beyond comprehension and I backed out at one point for fear that I would go insane and my family would find a babbling idiot in my room the next day.

This resonates with me. I have also had intense experiences during meditative, hypnagogic/hypnopompic and lucid dream states. I also have some experience with entheogens which induced ineffable mental episodes. The first time I took Salvia divinorum I had a profound and confusing experience where the world we know vanished and I felt like I had been taken light-years away to swim in a soup of molecules. There was a rush of emotions and a cascade of spatiotemporal data representing what felt like millions of years of history coming all at once in a dizzying sensation. Subsequently, I felt like I was standing on the edge of a precipice, screaming as I'm about to fall only to realise, as the surroundings became clear, that I was leaning over a coffee table and shouting 'Whoa!'

My university buddies were standing around, laughing their heads off at me and as I made my first attempt to explain what had just happened, I realised I had been reduced to a babbling idiot struggling to even utter the simplest words. Something had indeed overwhelmed me on that day and I ended up having a flashback of that momentary trip that night in my sleep, during a dream where I was standing on a moving train devoid of passengers. No words are adequate enough to convey what was experienced. It was fantastic, harrowing and I could have easily lost my mind.

Its been suggested that I might be happier if I lowered my expectations a little.

It's a good suggestion for anybody. This is one of the reasons why I find the Serenity Prayer quite powerful. It encourages one to find acceptance in the way things are and be ready to be presented with anything.

So for Holt the Universe implies itself.

That is just like the Fundamentalist circular logic that atheists love to ridicule. The Bible is God's Word because the Bible tells me so.

It's simple, really. The Universe just is what it is because the probability of there ever not being a Universe is astronomically impossible.
" It also argues that if a creator is behind it, such being would have to be extremely incompetent or simply indifferent—or perhaps one that allowed everything to experimentally unfold given the parameters." The creator (which does not exist) must be incompetent because Its creation doesn't measure up to my artistic sensibility. It is not beautiful enough according to my personal standards and the eye of my beholder.

This is the way people talk when they can't see the forest for the trees. Imagine an AI program calling the programmer incompetent for not making the program better in some way. In fact, the AI program has such a high opinion of itself that it claims there is no programmer, otherwise it would be a better program.

These lame rebuttals by the atheists are so silly. A Catholic priest/philosopher summed it up this way;
"They are like a bunch of cartoon characters collecting data from the cartoon and claiming that their cartoon data proves there is no cartoonist".

Yes. That sums it up nicely.

It does sum it up nicely and the priest's quote goes straight to the point ...

Why should the world be a readymade utopia when its inhabitants can find meaning and purpose interacting with the way it simply is, right? And why would a creator necessarily want to accommodate its creation when the story is more powerful with strife, tempests and the occasional bonanza? In conclusion, the myriad things we are not happy with the world do not evidence the absence of a creator or even necessarily the existence of an incompetent one—in the least, it could imply one that uses chaos as a default mode to give its sentient creations the impetus to organise themselves and become noble problem solvers.

Or, like the Deistic proposition, He abandoned His creation and does not care in the least about human affairs.

Another big False Assumption the agnostics make is that if there is a God he must not care about what is happening and is detached and distant and otherwise... dead.

On the contrary, God's breath is the animating Force behind all Life. Without this Breath/Prana/Life Force there would be no motion, no time, no expanding universe... the entire universe would be a giant wax museum of inanimate forms frozen in a state of suspended animation. Without at least a smidgin of Spirit there would be no life.

This is why the Holy Trinity is such a brilliant representation of Eternal Truth.

God = Holy Ghost = Godman/Savior

While the part of God that is the Source of all and the heart of all that is, may be detached (by necessity), It is Omnipresent by virtue of Its Eternal, unending Essence and Omnipotent by virtue of it ever-present Holy Spirit, through which all else lives and moves and has its being. The Holy Ghost is a kind of "zero point energy" that flows whenever circumstances permit or require It. It is not that God has abandoned the souls on Earth but that Earth is "Not God" by definition -- by virtue of the Created Scheme that is Creation.

"The corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthy tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things" (Wisd. 9:15).

Queue the Serenity Prayer here.

'And he said unto them, Which of you shall have a friend, and shall go unto him at midnight, and say unto him, Friend, lend me three loaves; For a friend of mine in his journey is come to me, and I have nothing to set before him? And he from within shall answer and say, Trouble me not: the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee. I say unto you, Though he will not rise and give him, because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth.

'And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?'

~Matthew 7:7-12

Interesting. So God's breath would be the mysterious 'dark energy' which appears to incessantly create more space out of nowhere, driving cosmic expansion. Coincidentally or not, the positive and negative energies of the universe add up to precisely zero ...

For Franz, the Jungian psychoanalyst, the Holy Spirit is what makes us feel whole. The Father is what we find and rescue deeply in us in times of turmoil when we awaken that archetypal wisdom from our long dead ancestors. The Son is the saviour in us, the problem-solver venturing into the unknown and willing to make sacrifices for the greater good. God, who sits at the top of the hierarchy of values, is all three.

I am that I am

It is fascinating how the "ask and ye shall receive" gospel has spawned a perpetual movement of "Unlimited Wealth" or "Think and Grow Rich" or "The Secret" and the gullible keep spending billion$ on a fairy tale of fabulous wealth. Yet, every few years they look around and they are still one paycheck away from bankruptcy.

The Prana/"dark energy" idea is a theory I have been considering lately. For now it seems to fit. The quality of Spirit is key. The Hindu Kriya Yoga system as well as other Kashmiri region cosmologies describe the Holy Spirit as pure, undifferentiated breath of God in the Eternal Realms of pre-Duality existence and then there is a split into positive and negative currents that fuel materialistic creation. One must learn to discern the source and understand the Eternal Creator beyond duality and the Illusion of god-like father-life-giver at the top of the material realm where all exists in relation to some type of opposite. The realms of duality are "created" at the beginning of time and will cease to exist at the end of time. The metaphysicians who view the Cosmic Consciousness attainment at the top of the Mental Realm with the Universal Mind encompassing ALL are in for a rude awakening at the end of the Maha Yuga. The Mind/Mental Machine was created at the beginning of time and while it does encompass all creation in the realms of duality -- it will cease to exist at the end of time. When is the end of time? It is whenever The Creator stops pumping Holy Spirit into the sails of created duality.

That which is created in time will cease to exist at the end of time. Thoughts are created things... I will let you guess what happens to all thoughts at the end of time.

Those Souls which have not transcended the Dualistic Consciousness will slip into a coma awaiting the next cycle of Maha Yuga (likened to the inhale and exhale of the Creator). Souls that have developed a certain facility with the Eternal Awareness of the Pure Spirit realm (Unity) will simply dwell in the condition they have been able to cultivate.