The following is a guest post by Evan Hadkins from WellbeingandHealth.net, a friend and frequent visitor to this blog. The genesis of this post was a comment he left in response to my article on The Nature of Reality that I posted a few weeks ago. I was so impressed by his comment, that I asked him to expand his thoughts here as a guest poster.
Above Photo by Laura. Photo Below by Lian Xiaoxiao. Final Photo by Alexandre Dulaunoy.
In the modern west, reality is split into with-in-my-skin and beyond-my-skin. I find this a useful distinction - building a house of bricks is very different to the building of a philosophy. The problem, as I see it, has been assigning priority to within-the-skin or beyond-the-skin. One of these is taken to be “the really real” and the other to be its effect. Both these views are prevalent.
Some people (usually advocating science and objectivity) think that it is the beyond-the-skin that is the important reality. They advocate psychology as the study of behaviour. Or see behaviour as the outcome of brain chemicals. There are those who believe that the within the skin is most real. They will assert that “it is with our thoughts that we make the world” and say that the difference between success and failure is motivation or attitude. Perhaps the most famous advocate of this approach is Louise Hay who believes that physical diseases are the manifestation of (and can be fixed by) our thoughts or “affirmations”.
Both of these approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. My point is that both are partial. I do not wish to advocate for either side of this dilemma. My approach is that reality is the experience of the meeting between me and this other stuff. Reality is a human experience.
In the west there has been the attempt to ‘filter out’ the subjective element; to somehow stand outside ourselves. This project is doomed. If I stand outside myself it is still the “I” doing the observing
. Objectivity in this sense is not possible. Subjectivity in the sense of “what is can be whatever I make it” is just silly. However, seeing that my experience and action is affected by my past experience, my current thoughts, beliefs and feelings is entirely verifiable.
The search for the nature of reality is one part of reality investigating another. Thus my teeth, tongue and taste buds investigate a piece of food. My enjoyment doesn’t mean that the food isn’t objectively real. Neither does the objectively real atomic structure of the food invalidate my enjoyment. Reality is this: meeting of the me and not-me. Reality is the meeting, not one part of the story.
When it comes to discussion of god the split between the within-the-skin and the beyond-the-skin parties is very much in evidence. There is a rash at the moment of books by militant atheists of the Chris Hitchens’ school saying that science and objectivity tell us what is so and that belief in god is ’subjective’ or ‘mythical’ and so forth. In contrast, there are also those who assert that their own thoughts and feelings mean that god (objectively) exists. This is hardly helpful. Those who attack the claim for god’s reality are often attacking the wrong ‘god’. In Christian theology, the field I know best, the “objectively real god” who sits somewhere outside physical reality, has not been taken seriously for decades. The serious theologians see that god is in the process, not outside “it”.
My suggestion is that we take seriously the experience of those who speak of god. “God” is a human experience - just as are the equations describing the behaviour of sub-atomic particles. This means that the attack on ‘belief in God’ is beside the point. It is not belief that is at issue but experience.
This makes it essential for those who are ‘believers’ to be able to say what their experience of God is. A central question is the what counts as evidence. Does what occurs in the lab judge the rest of our lives? Much of what we find personally convincing is unlikely to be duplicated in a lab. A personal anecdote to make the point: A friend of mine would greet whoever picked up the phone by name before they had spoken. (This was
before the days of caller ID.) He would do this consistently and reliably. This I find personally convincing. Could it be replicated in a lab, perhaps. Could it be replicated by others randomly chosen? Almost certainly not. But this doesn’t make it less convincing to me.
To have a fruitful discussion of the nature of reality and of the existence of god we need to move beyond the objective (beyond-the-skin-is-real) and subjective (within-the-skin-is-real) dispute. We need to begin speaking to each other about our experience. We need to be able to say what our experience of ‘god’ is or why we see the ’scientific’ account as more convincing. When we can start talking about what our words describe I think this discussion will be able to move forward in a fruitful way.
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