A PhD in Theology? How Is This Possible?

[Baruch]

trdsf - if one sets aside the illusion of time, and of individuality ... life is a tree, and the notion of species is just an academic convention.  A branch of a tree can no more exist without the rest of the tree, than we can exist without the biome we share the Earth with nor without all those prior life forms.  We are connected both together as humans, by common ancestry ... but we are the long term expression of the sexy desires of lung fishes who swam in Devonian seas (think of California grunion).  That for me is the magnificence of evolution ... but it is hard to set aside these common sense illusions to see things orthogonal to the usual ways.

ShyChief - I will match you and raise you a Professor Penrose ;-)

[Mike Cl]

trdsf - if one sets aside the illusion of time, and of individuality ... life is a tree, and the notion of species is just an academic convention.  A branch of a tree can no more exist without the rest of the tree, than we can exist without the biome we share the Earth with nor without all those prior life forms.  We are connected both together as humans, by common ancestry ... but we are the long term expression of the sexy desires of lung fishes who swam in Devonian seas (think of California grunion).  That for me is the magnificence of evolution ...

And that is why I don't feel the need for a God or gods.  That realization alone is enough to be awe inspiring for me.  And throw in that were are made up physically of the same stuff that makes up the stars, simply adds to the feeling of awe at being alive and connected all that ever was or will be.  Who needs a god for that??????

[trdsf]

And that is why I don't feel the need for a God or gods.  That realization alone is enough to be awe inspiring for me.  And throw in that were are made up physically of the same stuff that makes up the stars, simply adds to the feeling of awe at being alive and connected all that ever was or will be.  Who needs a god for that??????

And when you throw in the realization that we're not the point of evolution, but merely a point along the way... wow.  Deep time looking into the past is already a little dizzying, but deep time looking into the future is mindblowing.

[trdsf]

trdsf - if one sets aside the illusion of time, and of individuality ... life is a tree, and the notion of species is just an academic convention.  A branch of a tree can no more exist without the rest of the tree, than we can exist without the biome we share the Earth with nor without all those prior life forms.  We are connected both together as humans, by common ancestry ... but we are the long term expression of the sexy desires of lung fishes who swam in Devonian seas (think of California grunion).  That for me is the magnificence of evolution ... but it is hard to set aside these common sense illusions to see things orthogonal to the usual ways.

I don't really see time as an illusion.  I don't know exactly what time is, but it's at least something that we can measure, even if we can't dice it up and put it in an electron microscope or particle accelerator to see what makes it tick (and tock).

That an egg containing a chicken came out of something that was almost but not quite a chicken says nothing about any sort of biological disconnect; if anything, it's as explicit a statement of the biological and evolutionary connection of all life as you could ask for.  We're all part of the same chain of life that started with that first thing that could be called alive 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, and even of the random chemical reactions taking place before then that were almost but not quite alive that led to that first living thing (please don't ask me to mark a line where 'alive' and 'almost but not quite alive' is  ).

But we know there is such a thing as speciation, and evolution, so it must be the case that there was something that was almost but not quite a chicken, and from it came something that actually was a chicken, just like the first homo sapiens came out of something very close but not quite sapiens (probably rhodesiensis according to current theory).

[Baruch]

Mike CL - as educated people commonly understand nature ... it is awesome ... but also awful (full of awe ... and spoiler .. the word "awe" is a religious term, reused by secular folks).  Unfortunately most of us can't be scientists ... so we have to rely on one class of authority figures vs another.  For myself, I don't trust any of them, including clergy.  If I can do the science myself ... then I can see something I can put my hat on.  As either a secular or religious humanist ... I have to fundamentally object to reality as I see it.  It is more personal if I take the POV of a religious humanist.  In terms of secular humanist, reality such as hurricanes are meteorological physics ... but I object impotently either way.  Reality is either a monstrous impersonal cruelty or a monstrous personal cruelty.  I object to the end of the Book of Job ... and a secular humanist can't even do that.

trdsf - St Augustine was the first recorded human to worry about what time was, aside from other things.  It came up as part of theology.  The scholastics of the Middle Ages already had space-time diagrams before Columbus ... but we selectively forget that to promote particular narratives.  It was Newton, who pulled time out of events, and made it back again in the "stream" of Heraclitus (Newton uses the exact same analogy in his Principia).  His view of 3-D space as absolute was similarly philosophical, and again based on his view of G-d's omniscience (see George Berkeley for expansion).

In a practical sense, without relying on the authority of Minkowski or Einstein ... I only know the present, which is like a narrow overlap between the past and the future.  But I can't directly experience the past ... my memory is faulty, and artifacts now present are subject to interpretation (see Bible).  The Minkowski/Einstein idea is that the past and future have always existed ... like geography, but we humans are traveling thru it ... so what is moving, reality or you?  I don't accept this.  For me the future in particular is open, not pre-determined (but theologians are often happy with pre-determination too).  I see the future in emotional terms ... as fear mixed with hope.  The past, may have left ambiguous evidence of itself ... but that evidence is in the present, or it is not available to us.  It isn't the real past, it is at best a shadow.  So for me, the past is also set in emotional terms ... pride and guilt.  Quantum mechanics and relativity show, that cause/effect is a primitive animal coping technique ... depending on circumstances, effects can happen before causes.  If one's sense of time is based on cause/effect memories ... then one has to discard it as a gestalt ... a product of brain processing, that enhances survival.  But that doesn't make it real.

BTW - species is just as invalid a concept, though a convenient one, as races of humans.  Humans categorize things ... and the things ignore us and go on about their business.  See the relationship between the tiger and lion as an example.

[Mike Cl]

Mike CL - as educated people commonly understand nature ... it is awesome ... but also awful (full of awe ... and spoiler .. the word "awe" is a religious term, reused by secular folks).  Unfortunately most of us can't be scientists ... so we have to rely on one class of authority figures vs another.  For myself, I don't trust any of them, including clergy.  If I can do the science myself ... then I can see something I can put my hat on.  As either a secular or religious humanist ... I have to fundamentally object to reality as I see it.  It is more personal if I take the POV of a religious humanist.  In terms of secular humanist, reality such as hurricanes are meteorological physics ... but I object impotently either way.  Reality is either a monstrous impersonal cruelty or a monstrous personal cruelty.  I object to the end of the Book of Job ... and a secular humanist can't even do that.

Yes, awe is a religious term and that is how I meant it--reverence, admiration, and fear.  And a healthy dose of fear.  And horror.  What produces those feelings is that Nature is the exact opposite of love, nurture, and all those fuzzy words and of hate--Nature is indifferent.  Nature does not care if you live or die.  Does not care one way or the other.  When one looks closely at nature, one sees death and destruction everywhere--and birth and life everywhere.  Life needs to feed--on other life and on non-life.  Life does not care, as long as it can live.  There really are not rules--life just does what it needs to to live--or it doesn't.  Nature does not care.  I look upon nature and see cruelty.  But that is because I do care; but nature does not care that I care.  That is all on me.  I love big cats, especially the snow leopard.  But when I see a snow leopard killing a sheep, I realize how cruel it is--but it has no choice.  Either it kills as it needs to or it dies.  That, too is cruel for the snow leopard as well as the sheep, depending upon how one views that act.  Nothing is easy or black and white.  And so, looking at the universe I realize I am part of this--physically part of it--the very stuff that makes the universe makes me.  So, I am connected to all that is and was.  And will be.  How is that not awesome?  I get a feeling of a type of reverence--but that feeling is all one me, for nature does not give a shit.  And yes, fear comes when one looks very deeply into the system.  So--awe is what I feel. 

And the deeper I look into Nature, the more I regard it as proof that there cannot be a God.  Gods are all about love, hate, and all the emotions in between--Nature is about indifference.  And a God cannot be indifferent.

[Baruch]

Being a freethinking theist ... I don't depersonalize nature ... if anything I believe in Mother Nature ... and she is a bitch.  My relationship with deity isn't worship ;-)  The Jewish version of G-d is quite indifferent and nearly Olympian in faults.  The idea of deity in perfection ... is about the stupidest idea I could imagine Plato coming up with ;-)  Plato was more influenced by Pythagoras than by Socrates.  Aristotle tried to depersonalize Plato's theology, with the "unmoved mover".  That always makes me think of a U-Haul company, where it helps everyone else move, but never has to move itself.

This is where I also split with Nature as a source of ethics.  By nature I should prey on other human beings, in a Darwinian contest.  But since I don't do that, am I un-natural? ;-)  But if you are more into Classical paganism ... deity is a smaller thing, and humans are capable of being demigods.  In fact I would affirm that we are ... and that all beings (but not all things) are.  A being is qualitatively different than a thing.

[trdsf]

trdsf - St Augustine was the first recorded human to worry about what time was, aside from other things.  It came up as part of theology.  The scholastics of the Middle Ages already had space-time diagrams before Columbus ... but we selectively forget that to promote particular narratives.  It was Newton, who pulled time out of events, and made it back again in the "stream" of Heraclitus (Newton uses the exact same analogy in his Principia).  His view of 3-D space as absolute was similarly philosophical, and again based on his view of G-d's omniscience (see George Berkeley for expansion).

It's hard to say that Augustine's approach to time was a scientific or rationalist one, though.  He may have recognized a difference between the natural and the supernatural, but in the Augustinian view, the natural was necessarily subservient to the supernatural.

I will admit up front that I haven't much use for philosophical approaches to scientific matters.  I'm talking about the observable, the measurable, and the objective (or at least as close to the objective as we can get), and just about every time philosophy tries to tell science what it's supposed to be about, it's been wrong.  Certainly in terms of current research, the Augustinian and even the Newtonian views of time have been at a minimum superseded.

In a practical sense, without relying on the authority of Minkowski or Einstein ... I only know the present, which is like a narrow overlap between the past and the future.  But I can't directly experience the past ... my memory is faulty, and artifacts now present are subject to interpretation (see Bible).  The Minkowski/Einstein idea is that the past and future have always existed ... like geography, but we humans are traveling thru it ... so what is moving, reality or you?  I don't accept this.  For me the future in particular is open, not pre-determined (but theologians are often happy with pre-determination too).  I see the future in emotional terms ... as fear mixed with hope.  The past, may have left ambiguous evidence of itself ... but that evidence is in the present, or it is not available to us.  It isn't the real past, it is at best a shadow.  So for me, the past is also set in emotional terms ... pride and guilt.  Quantum mechanics and relativity show, that cause/effect is a primitive animal coping technique ... depending on circumstances, effects can happen before causes.  If one's sense of time is based on cause/effect memories ... then one has to discard it as a gestalt ... a product of brain processing, that enhances survival.  But that doesn't make it real.

That's not quite an accurate reading of what quantum mechanics means.  While at the quantum level cause and effect can be reversed, at the macro level where we live, it's functionally impossible -- to get that many quantum events to line up all together to generate a reversal of time or a reversal of cause and effect at the level of a human brain, you may as well expect to hit the jackpot on every MegaMillions and Powerball drawing for an entire year.  And I think the odds of hitting those 208 drawings are probably better than the odds of a cause/effect reversal on a scale as large as a human brain.

Whether or not the past has any real existence, I don't know.  But any pride or guilt you might feel about it is experiential and subjective, and rather outside the question.  You're asking physics to be philosophy here.

BTW - species is just as invalid a concept, though a convenient one, as races of humans.  Humans categorize things ... and the things ignore us and go on about their business.  See the relationship between the tiger and lion as an example.

'Species' is a perfectly valid concept.  See the relationship between a tiger and a wolf.

[Mike Cl]

Being a freethinking theist ... I don't depersonalize nature ... if anything I believe in Mother Nature ... and she is a bitch.  My relationship with deity isn't worship ;-)  The Jewish version of G-d is quite indifferent and nearly Olympian in faults.  The idea of deity in perfection ... is about the stupidest idea I could imagine Plato coming up with ;-)  Plato was more influenced by Pythagoras than by Socrates.  Aristotle tried to depersonalize Plato's theology, with the "unmoved mover".  That always makes me think of a U-Haul company, where it helps everyone else move, but never has to move itself.

This is where I also split with Nature as a source of ethics.  By nature I should prey on other human beings, in a Darwinian contest.  But since I don't do that, am I un-natural? ;-)  But if you are more into Classical paganism ... deity is a smaller thing, and humans are capable of being demigods.  In fact I would affirm that we are ... and that all beings (but not all things) are.  A being is qualitatively different than a thing.

I don't depersonalize nature, but I don't give it any divine qualities, either.  Since I am part of nature, it would be silly of me to denounce it.  But I don't have to make it more than it is.  I don't think nature and ethics equate at all.  nature is totally neutral and indifferent.  Ethics is a human thing.  Humans have or don't have ethics; no other species I know of has ethics as we think of them.   And no matter how hard I've looked--how open I've been--I don't see or feel even the slightest hint of a deity. 

[Baruch]

See my post on the necessity of supernatural in religion ... as far as "divine qualities" goes.  I think it is a difference without any difference.  The idealization of G-d by theologians, is what you would mean by "divine qualities" ... but since I reject theology and idealization ... I don't have your Straw Man argument.  We basically agree, but we use different words for the same things.

We will have to disagree about nature ... we are omnivorous predators ... in nature, there is nothing neutral about the proscription that I should kill and eat other animals, including other human beings.  Other than humans might taste bad of course ;-)  For me, indifference is the opposite of morality ... and so when I say that G-d is amoral, I am not being neutral at all.

[Baruch]

trdsf ... good that you are a hard empiricist.  On the other things, we will have to disagree, but then they are more philosophical.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Highest honour you can get at Oxbridge (or used to be able to get) was a Dr of Divinity. The colleges were initially theological however have obviously changed as year have gone by.

Whilst I view a holy book based Theology doctorate with contempt owing to the fact that I believe the cornerstone basis of the subject to be make believe, theology has impacts beyond the understanding of the given holy text. There are entire movements that have built up around theology (liberation theology for example), and whilst again I view the basis of the belief to be nonsensical, the real world impacts of those theologies are worth studying and understanding. These would also fit, in certain ways, within a theology doctorate.

[Baruch]

Great post.  Liberation theology has a theistic source, but the impact was enough to cause the US to go out and murder people, including nuns ;-(  That is the danger with free range ideas ... gotta make videots out of people, so we know what they are thinking ... "New/Improved Tide ... gotta buy some".  If people only think they ideas we put in their heads ... then all's good, right?

But I disagree a little ... there is theoretical theology, and practical theology.  Definitely theoretical theology should be put in the same department as fantasy literature.  Practical theology is politics for theists ... needs to be in the political science department ... where it can be carefully guided by the Elite.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Great post.  Liberation theology has a theistic source, but the impact was enough to cause the US to go out and murder people, including nuns ;-(  That is the danger with free range ideas ... gotta make videots out of people, so we know what they are thinking ... "New/Improved Tide ... gotta buy some".  If people only think they ideas we put in their heads ... then all's good, right?

But I disagree a little ... there is theoretical theology, and practical theology.  Definitely theoretical theology should be put in the same department as fantasy literature.  Practical theology is politics for theists ... needs to be in the political science department ... where it can be carefully guided by the Elite.

I cannot disagree with you. When I was doing my PhD much of it was within a theology department as I looked at Sikh NGOs and their use of government/EU funds in local regeneration projects in my city. Learning about their theology was important, and their works would have made little sense without the theological context behind it.

Thank you for the elucidation on practical/theoretical theology. I'd never constructed that image in my mind before but it makes much more sense to call the divide as you describe and work at it from there.

[Mike Cl]

We will have to disagree about nature ... we are omnivorous predators ... in nature, there is nothing neutral about the proscription that I should kill and eat other animals, including other human beings.  Other than humans might taste bad of course ;-)  For me, indifference is the opposite of morality ... and so when I say that G-d is amoral, I am not being neutral at all.

I did not mean to imply that I was neutral about nature.  But I don't think nature cares one way or the other if our species lives or dies.  And it does not care how we gather our energy to live.  I am not fond of the idea that I must kill to live.  But that is simply the way it is and I can accept that or not.  So, I chose to accept it.  Does not mean I have to kill in cruel ways, just that I must kill.  For me indifference is the opposite of love and hate, which are passions or emotions; indifference is the lack of emotion or passion.  Maybe indifference is the opposite of morality, I had not thought of that.  Morality is different for each of us; and it can change from hour to hour.  So, maybe a moral thought has to have emotion attached to it, and if so, then indifference would be the opposite of that.