Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

   Post 88. June 19, 2019 continued . . .

  Reality is a Theory

   Is G*D Just a Theory?

 Unfortunately, such a compromise between adverse truth-seeking methods raises the specter of a return to the weird world of muggles & magic, matter & spirit, humans & demons. Since I have reached a conclusion similar to Kastrup's — that Reality is ultimately Ideality — I am forced to deal with a philosophical dilemma of my own. If the infinite source of finite reality — which I call G*D — is responsible for the disjunct between our percepts and concepts, the reasonable follow-up question is “Why?”5 Did G*D intend for He/r self-conscious creatures to be perennially perplexed about what's real or not? What purpose might the fundamental ambiguity of reality serve, either for Creator or Creature? Such a mystifying question might indicate why Atheists find the notion of an omniscient omni-benevolent God so absurd. It's also why they insist on empirical evidence for any non-objective assertion of faith, such as the existence of an invisible deity, knowable only by the third-eye of Faith. Like the unverifiable hypothetical Multiverse beyond the bottle-neck of the Big Bang, G*D may be just a theory6. Is Reality also a figment of rational imagination?

While I am content to accept the existence of G*D as a truish philosophical axiom, I suppose that Kastrup, motivated by Christian faith, would prefer to think of Jehovah as the ultimate Truth. The difference in our attitudes may be related to the notion of Salvation. If you believe in the reality of Hell, you’d better hope there is a Heaven. But, if the creator of the real world with its sentient creatures also created Dante’s Inferno as a receptacle for the rejects, I must question the deity’s good intentions, and omnipotence. Why not skip the trials & tribu-lations, and go straight to the final goal of a community of im-mortal beings perpetually singing the praises of a vainglorious & insecure King. We could debate why the King would need both ideal angels and real humans. But I don’t concern myself with such trivial side-issues, since I have no extra-biblical reasons to believe that an eternal deity would use the out-dated tech-nology of winged messengers to convey information from Heaven to Earth. Didn’t Heaven have cell-phone service?

I'm impressed with Kastrup's scholarship, and agree with most of his arguments against the methodological materialism of modern science. But I can't agree with his implicit alternative of the a> monotheistic (Allah) & polytheistic (saints, angels, demons); b> spiritual (Yahweh) & material (Jesus); and c> supernatural (creator) & natural (interventionist) theology of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions. The sophistry behind those religious doctrines leaves us with the persistent para-doxes of theology that have divided the worshipers of such dualistic deities into thousands of quarreling sects. Instead, I have attempted to discover an alternative cosmology that is consistent with both rational science/philosophy and with emotional human needs/desires. Kastrup has indeed cast doubt upon Naturalism & Materialism, but shed little light on Super-naturalism & Spiritualism. The resulting ambiguity has forced most people to retreat into aggressive or defensive Either/Or positions. By contrast, my BothAnd principle embraces the enigma of our existence, and adopts a modest agnostic world-view that should serve as a bridge over the abyss separating modern Science & ancient Religion. 

End of Post 88

Life is ambiguous


Deal with it

5. Why?
  If the ultimate cause of reality is conscious and intentional, then the question is valid. Atheists deny any purpose in the world at large, so our confusion is merely a personal problem.
   Theists assume that God created the world for the good of His creatures. So, any doubt about their role and relation in that scheme would seem to impede the purpose.
   BothAnd deals with the part/whole ambiguity, partly with agnosticism and partly by accepting the duality of reality as a necessary fea-ture of a space-time cosmos within the larger context of infinity-eternity. A finite mind cannot fathom the infinite. So, anything humans can perceive is “natural”, and anything we can only conceive is “super-natural”, or as I prefer : “physical” and “meta-physical”.
   Both sides of this cosmic coin are ultimately real, but we can only see one side at a time. If you ask physical questions, you should get physical answers, and vice-versa. But when your queries concern what’s on the other side, the answers must be dualistic : both heads and tails simultaneously. Can you handle that?
   Maybe the Programmer of progressive creation intended to eventually produce mindful creatures that can live on the edge of the cosmic coin. In any case, there is no reason to believe that easily perplexed human animals, who only emerged after 14 billion years, are the ultimate purpose of creation. The “Why” may only become evident in retrospect.

6. G*D Theory :
   A human theory is a projection from the known into the unknown, from now into the future. Anything physical can be known via the six senses. But our minds are capable of extending beyond the limits of here & now to imagine a possibility, and to evaluate it as a probability.
  Common sense Reality is as close as we come to a hard fact. But the sixth sense of Reason allows us to im-agine a reality beyond physic-ality that I call Ideality.    For example, quantum physicists gathered from certain anom-alies in their evidence that a hypothetical particle called the Higgs Boson necessarily must exist in order to explain gravity. They have now shifted the status of that theoretical object to a proven fact. Yet no-one has ever seen the particle with their senses, so they accept its existence based on extra-sensory evidence (i.e. faith).
   G*D is such a theoretical “fact”, based on the indirect evidence of an anomalous world with a beginning and end, necessitating a First Cause. Conventional Reality (Cosmos) is also a theoretical construct, since no-one has ever seen it as a whole from god’s view on the outside.
   Kastrup described the objective world as “akin to a transpersonal dream”. In other words, we are all sharing the same mind-movie running in the cosmic theater : the Mind of G*D. Our personal percep-tions of that divine dream are limited and local, so we never see the Whole. As long as there is a difference between G*D and Man, there will be ambiguity.