Pure scientistic atheism, wherein we are no more than a collection of atoms and atomic interactions, and not significantly different from any other animal, forged by natural selection alone, leaves out much of what is important and plainly true. There is no place in such a world view for real value, for phenomenal experience, for objective emotional judgments, intuition, or anything that makes humanity truly noble. Just living a fully human life gives one access to the unknowable and the sublime. But scientism denies that these are real, that they exist at all. Thus everything that makes us genuinely human is left out. But at least such a scientism and atheism engenders humility. We know in such a world that we are truly nothing.
A softer atheism that tries to include such notions has a different problem. For such an atheism looks at all the sublimity emanating from humans individually and culturally and sees it as something at comes from human nature itself. Human experience really is something special but it is because human beings are something special. If humanity is the very source of the sublime, if our judgments are what make something sublime, then we ourselves are sublime. Such a worldview does justice to the human experience, but it lacks humility which is in and of itself part of that experience.
A Christian believes in the baseness of humanity, but sees human experience as sublime. That sublimity is not inherent nor earned but granted by a God because of HIS great love. In such a system the full breadth of human experience is accounted for, yet we are not elevated to some godlike status. If the wonder of the universe is a gift to an undeserving creation, then truly we have nothing to be prideful of, though we will never stop our pretense.
Do we not think phenomenal experience is a problem for intelligent, emotional animals, too, philosophically speaking? For that matter, what does theism do to solve it? If our subjective experience participates in the divine (an idea that has had some attraction for me off and on), what is the nature of it?
ReplyDeleteIn the case of phenomenal experience, my argument is not that somehow theism helps explain it, I don't know how it could. My caveat on this is that mind makes a lot more sense if mind is somehow primary in the universe. It remains a mystery, but a divine mystery, and we don't spend all of our time trying to make sense of it in terms of what is 'close by' (matter and such). I'm not a dualist, and I wouldn't make that argument, but hey there is something to it. But that isn't my point here. What I'm rather speaking to is just how 'phenomenal' (in the evaluative sense of the term) phenomenal consciousness is. There is something divine just about being able to experience at all. "There is a quality to life that transcends the facts of life", as Whitehead says. It is the divine or sublime quality to being a conscious being that I speak of.
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