Category Archives: God

Disbelieving in God without being an atheist

08 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by in Buddhism, God, M.T.S.R., Metaphysics, Practice

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In recent years – years since I began writing this blog – I have come to realize that I do not believe in God. This is not a mere agnosticism; I believe that God does not exist. The idea of God once helped us make sense of the physical world in a way that it no longer does; the learned men and women who have studied living organisms have been most successful with a paradigm that has no need for a divine plan. Moreover the suffering of the world gives us active reason to disbelieve in God. It makes the idea of an omnipotent omnibenevolent creator seem almost absurd. There is no particular reason to believe an omnipotent being exists; if he did, he could not be omnibenevolent. He would likely be indifferent at best, evil at worst. Certainly not a being to worship or trust. I have become increasingly sympathetic to the drastic atheism of the Speculative Realist philosophers, who take their metaphors for existence from H.P. Lovecraft.

I have tended to think the non-design-based arguments for God’s existence are not taken seriously enough, and have defended them here in the past. But in the end I do not think they succeed. Continue reading →

Karmic punishment is not a good thing

23 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Free Will, German Tradition, God, Karma, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Morality, Patient Endurance, Politics, Self

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I’m continuing to examine Justin Whitaker‘s interpretation of Pali Buddhist ethics as Kantian moral law. I argued last time that the concept of dhamma does not serve in these texts as a universal, trans-human moral law. Here I want to take a similar look at the concept of kamma – better known in English as karma.

Justin claims that for Kant “the Moral Law is universal, concerned with all (rational) beings, and is holistic in its conception of morality as a guarantor to a just realm of ends (supported by the moral argument for belief in God).” (47) I think this interpretation of Kant is missing something in that Kant does not view the moral argument as demonstrating that there actually is a guarantee of cosmic justice, only that we must act as if there is (it is a regulative ideal). But I’ll leave that aside here because I want to focus on the comparison to Buddhism. Continue reading →

Incompleteness in knowledge and existence

28 Sunday May 2017

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, God, Islam, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Self

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Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.

A friend read the previous post on ibn Sīnā and Śāntideva and asked (on Google+) what exactly I meant by “incompleteness”. It was a great question and made me realize there was a bit of confusion in my own thinking.

The point of connection I saw between the two different thinkers was above all at the level of understanding the world. Continue reading →

ibn Sīnā and Śāntideva on the incompleteness of the world

14 Sunday May 2017

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, God, Islam, Mahāyāna, Metaphysics, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Self

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Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.

I’ve been thinking lately about MacIntyre’s explanation of the Muslim philosopher ibn Sīnā and the ways in which ibn Sīnā’s concept of God requires us to rethink the entire world around us if we accept it:

From [atheists’] standpoint a theist is someone who believes in just one more being than they do and who therefore has the responsibility for justifying her or his belief in this extra entity. But from the standpoint of the theist this is already to have misconceived both God and theistic belief in God. To believe in God is not to believe that in addition to nature, about which atheists and theists can agree, there is something else, about which they disagree. It is rather that theists and atheists disagree about nature as well as about God. For theists believe that nature presents itself as radically incomplete, as requiring a ground beyond itself, if it is to be intelligible, and so their disagreement with atheists involves everything. (God, Philosophy, Universities p. 47)

What’s drawing my attention is that you could write a very similar passage to characterize Buddhism. Continue reading →

On wanting it darker

04 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in Aesthetics, Death, Despair, External Goods, God, Hope, Judaism, Mahāyāna, Modernized Buddhism

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Leonard Cohen at the Arena in Geneva, 27 October 2008

Leonard Cohen at the Arena in Geneva, 27 October 2008

2016 has taken many great musicians from us. Early in the year we lost Prince and David Bowie. Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip is still with us for now, but the band played its last concert. And then there was Leonard Cohen.

Cohen began his career as one of the long parade of 1960s singer-songwriters who temporarily changed the phrase “folk music” so that it now referred to the music of educated urban élites. He earned a place alongside Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan – many of whom he played with. In that context he developed his talent for enigmatic, evocative lyrics. But as far as I’m concerned, none of his real greatness comes from that period. If he had died as young as Janis Joplin (or Amy Winehouse), I wouldn’t be writing this tribute, and a few decades from now I’m not sure that he would be remembered.

Cohen’s real brilliance came out in the 1980s and early 1990s, when decades of whisky and cigarettes had lowered his sensitive folkie voice into a gravelly growl, and his music took a darker turn to match. Continue reading →

The will of the people and the intellect of the people

17 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, God, Politics

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Last time I discussed how the medieval debate between intellectualism and voluntarism remains around today in the distinction between natural and positive law. But there’s another way it remains around, which I think is more fundamental.

The key question between intellectualism and voluntarism is: what is more fundamental to ethics and politics, the intellect or the will? In the Middle Ages, of course, the intellect and will in question were God’s. Between natural law and positive law, the intellect and will are those of the lawmaker: is law whatever the lawmaker wills it to be, or is there a true law that the lawmaker should be able to discern intellectually from reality and base her decisions on?

Few would want to vest authority in just any lawmaker. In modern politics, especially but not only in the West, we typically place a very high value on the idea of democracy, rule by the people. If we are not sympathetic to the slogan vox populi, vox dei – the voice of the people is the voice of God – it is often because we do not believe in God, and see the voice of the people as higher than God’s.

But if the people should rule, what aspect of the people should rule? Their intellect, or their will? Continue reading →

On natural law and positive law

03 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by in Foundations of Ethics, God, Hermeneutics, Islam, Morality, Politics, Protestantism, Reading and Recitation, Roman Catholicism

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In the previous discussion of why intellectualism and voluntarism are important, I left out what I think may be the most important aspect of all, one which leaves its mark on our thought today in the modern West. Namely: whether God is an intellect or a will bears directly on the way we think of morality – at least when we understand morality in terms of law, as the Abrahamic traditions all have to some degree.

If God is a will, then that will makes morality: morality is whatever God’s will commands. Continue reading →

Is God an intellect or a will?

19 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by in God, Islam, Judaism, Metaphysics, Roman Catholicism

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Medieval Christian philosophy (or theology), often referred to as “scholasticism”, is often characterized as being about abstract questions with no relevance to anybody outside the scholastics’ own tradition. “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” is often taken as an example of their sort of irrelevant question, though as far as I know no medieval philosopher ever actually asked that question. People who characterize medieval Christian thought this way would likely also need to say the same about medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophy if they knew anything about it (which, typically, they don’t).

You will probably have guessed that I do not share this assessment of medieval thought. True, some of their questions presuppose so much that it is hard to imagine it relevant to those outside their tradition – such as the question of whether angels can occupy the same physical space, which they actually did ask. But every tradition depends on assumptions that others may not necessarily share – certainly including analytic philosophy, where so much ethical reflection depends on taken-for-granted “intuitions”. For these reasons I often refer to analytic philosophy as the scholasticism of the liberal tradition.

Yet analytic philosophy does ask questions that are relevant to those who do not share its assumptions, and the same is true of medieval thought – even on questions that might appear irrelevant at first glance. I note this point with reference to one medieval question in particular: Continue reading →

Why give Cthulhu a happy ending?

03 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by in Aesthetics, Biology, Christianity, God, Metaphysics, Natural Science

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A few years ago, Skholiast wrote a lovely post on the philosophical significance of J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft, two early 20th-century writers who shaped the genres we now call fantasy and horror, respectively. I was reminded of it this year at an enjoyable AAR panel entitled “Cthulhu’s Many Tentacles”.

Cthulhu Cthulhu, of course, is the best-known character (if that is the word) from Lovecraft’s stories, enough that the fictional pantheon he created has become known as the “Cthulhu Mythos”. Cthulhu is one of a set of “Elder Gods”: horrifying, vaguely amorphous, often tentacled monstrosities that have lain dormant for millennia and will soon devour humanity; their horror is such that the mere knowledge of them could drive one mad. The AAR panel gave recognition to many aspects of Lovecraft’s work: starting with a presentation on the man and his work itself, the presenters proceeded to examine the varied dimensions of the fandom that has grown up around Lovecraft (noting, in particular, that fan creativity has been greatly enabled by Lovecraft’s work rising into the public domain).

The most interesting point I took away from the panel came from a talk by David McConeghy (who also, coincidentally, was the respondent to my paper on teaching with technology). McConeghy noted that while a great deal of modern speculative fiction (he cited Mike Mignola’s comic-book series Hellboy) is clearly inspired by Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and makes references to it, these works also typically have happy endings. Continue reading →

Praying to something you don’t believe in, redux

24 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in External Goods, God, Honesty, Human Nature, Humility, M.T.S.R., Mahāyāna, Prayer, Supernatural, Truth, Virtue

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I mentioned last time that in dealing with my wife’s cancer, I had started praying to Mañjuśrī, just as I had done (and written about here) five years ago in another period of my life that involved emotional difficulties – though considerably less difficult than this.

But that previous time had posed me an intellectual challenge as well, for I didn’t believe Mañjuśrī existed, as a sentient being capable of answering prayers. And while I may be calling myself a Buddhist now, what I said then still holds true: “I don’t think there is actually somebody out there who accumulated enough good karma to become a celestial being who redirects good karma down to the rest of us for our benefit.” Can it make any sense to pray to something you don’t believe in?

As it turned out, the question bothers me a lot less now than it once had. Continue reading →

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