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Vedanta Philosophy - Part 2

2006-11-30T16:52:00.000-08:00

In my last post on the subject I introduced Advaita Vedanta (Hindu) ontology and the three categories of reality: necessary existence (sat), impossible existence (asat), and world-appearance (mithya).

So where does God fit into this ontology? The Western concept of God is not something that can be projected onto the Vedanta system. For now, forget everything you've been told about the theistic God. Done? Good, let's proceed along logical lines and see where we end up. The "prime mover" (Brahman) contains both the material and efficient cause of the universe. But as any critic of the cosmological argument knows, there's a problem with that idea. Brahman is necessary, i.e., a self-existent pure being. How can such a being cause the universe without itself being subject to movement and change? If the prime mover participated in the chain of causation then it is rational to ask what caused it.

Vedanta's answer to this classic dilemma is to put a bridge between the unchanging, undifferentiated and infinite pure being and that of the finite contingent world-appearance that emanates from it. So pure being -- the infinite ground of all being as Tillich would say -- is "unqualified" Brahman (nirguna Brahman) and the bridge between it and the contingent world is "qualified" Brahman (sirguna Brahman). Unqualified Brahman is pure being itself and you can't say anything about it at all other than it is. Nirguna Brahman has no discernable properties. This is what I referred to in the last post as a logical deduction rather than a personal God. Without being you've got nothing; but there's something or we wouldn’t be here to talk about it so therefore you must have being.

Qualified Brahman does have properties, including femininity, and Hindus call her by many names: Maya, Ishvara, Krishna, God, Kali, and others. When God is anthropomorphized or given properties this is the being to which those properties and traits are assigned. This is the god of the great unwashed masses. The people have a thousand names for her and a thousand ideas about who she is but the true sages know that she does not really exist. She is nonetheless both the material and efficient cause of the universe. This graph illustrates the relationship:

Pure Being (Nirguna Brahman) <- Maya (God) -> Universe

Notice that God is a bridge between self-existent pure being and the contingent world. The arrow points toward pure being because Maya gets her power from Pure Being the way Earth gets its power from the Sun. With such power (shakti) Maya creates and sustains the universe. In the Bhagavad Gita in her guise as Krishna, she says "the entire expansive material energy is the womb (yoni) ... manifested by me" (14.3). This seems to solve the metaphysical problem of being and becoming.

Maya translates literally as "not this." That's because both she and the world-appearance that she creates is an illusion. According to Vedanta everything you see around you isn't really real. (The plot from the movie "The Matrix" was inspired by this concept and there's an interesting parallel here to the Christian Gnostics which I'll explore some other time.) This is hard for Westerners to understand. We know that we have a limited lifespan and we know that everything is contingent and nothing lasts. But why call it an illusion?

To understand why you have to realize that for Vedanta if something is contingent then it ought not to be of ultimate concern. That's like clinging to a sinking ship. Even more important, since this world depends upon Pure Being to sustain it then there is only the One. In the end, Vedanta is both a pantheism and a monism. Pure Being is all there is, all else is an illusion that depends upon the One to sustain it. Liberation can only be achieved by the deep realization that there is only the One. Further, you are not this world but rather Pure Being Itself. Yogis greet each other with namaste which means “I bow to the divine in you.” That is, behind the illusion there is only one reality and we are that divine reality. That’s pretty heavy stuff so I'll leave it at that for now and come back to it in a future post.

One last comment for now: Vedanta metaphysics has been influenced heavily by the ancient Greeks. Aristotle in particular gave Shankara (the 8th century founder of the Vedanta school) the vocabulary to speak of Brahman, Maya, Shakti, and the world-appearance in the way I outline it above. But for the ancient Indo-Europeans of the Vedic period the story was different. The ancients knew very well of course that it took both a mother and a father to have a baby. Nothing could be created without the male and female power. Why shouldn’t the whole world be any different? The Mother Goddess (as Maya) contains the power to create (shakti) within her but must couple with the male (Brahman) to fructify and give birth to the cosmos. This is the stuff of Joseph Campbell's Masks of God and I won't go into it here. Suffice it to say that the Aristotelian metaphysics was overlaid on a much older creation story. This happened in Judaism as well. The god of Abraham had his consort Ashterah, and King Solomon worshipped them both (1 Kings 11:5). It wasn't until much later when the Goddess was finally purged from Judaism that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo was conjured to explain how a male deity could create the universe.

Teaser for a future post! Ever wonder why at his Sermon on the Mount Jesus would instruct people to pray asking God not to lead us into temptation? Why would God want to lead us astray?

Vedanta Philosophy

2006-11-27T12:51:00.000-08:00

Over time I'd like to say a few things about important points in Vedanta (Hindu) philosophy. This is a neglected area not just among Western philosophers of religion but also among nonbelievers who are naturally curious and interested in what other religions have to say. And hopefully it will be something a little different and maybe even fun.

[Disclaimer: I am not an academic expert! I have practiced yoga for several years now and I've read and studied Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, Yogavashishta, and the Bhagavad Gita. These and other studies have been under the guidance of a teacher in the context of a disciplined approach toward the attainment of what is called nirvikalpa samadhi or the realization of the Self. Yes, I'm an atheist. But there are plenty of atheists who go to Universalist churches every Sunday.]

Ok let me start with ontology and a passage from the Bhagavad Gita: "In the unreal (asatah) there is no duration and in the real (satah) there is no cessation. Knowers of the truth have concluded this by studying the nature of both" (2.16).

The real (sat) is opposite the unreal (asat). In western terms, the real is what we would say is necessary. It cannot not be. The unreal is impossible. It cannot be (e.g., a barren woman's son). The third order of reality is the contingent, or things which exist but not necessarily. This is called the world-appearance, or in western terms "empirical reality" and it is said to be illusory (mithya).

Vedantism arrives at a definition of the real through a cosmological deduction familiar to philosophers of religion: (1) all beings in the world are contingent and must depend upon another being for their efficient causation; (2) since a being cannot be its own efficient cause nor can there be an infinite array of efficient causes; therefore (3) there must be a prime efficient cause.

This prime efficient cause, or "unmoved mover" in Aristotle's terminology, is what Hindus call Brahman (sat, reality). It is important to recognize that Brahman is not the God of Abraham and Christianity. Brahman is a deduction from the consideration of the contingency of the world-appearance.

Vedantism places a huge emphasis on rationalism and follows the ancient Greek distrust of the senses. What at first looks like a snake turns out to be a coiled rope. The senses deceive. Because of this and because it exists contingently the world is like an illusion that fools us. The Yoga Sutras define ignorance (avidya) as "mistaking the non-eternal for the eternal" (2.5). In other words, considering the world of empiricism to be real and permanent instead of transitory and temporary.

There is an extremely interesting parallel here to the pre-Socratic Parmenides and his "Way of Truth" poem but I'll leave that for another time.

The Hidden Imam

2006-02-01T22:07:00.001-08:00

In his speech before the United Nations last fall, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prayed that Allah (God) might usher in the era of the “Hidden Imam.” It was a curious remark that at the time I filed away and resolved to research later. Well, it’s later. The “end times” to be precise, for the Hidden Imam is an eschatological figure in Islam that will bring about a new world order:

"The Hidden Imam ... will eventually leave his Greater Occultation and appear (zuhur) to the world of humanity. This return is the most significant event in the future for the Shi'ite faithful and has thunderous eschatological consequences. This return will occur shortly before the Final Judgement [sic] and the end of history. Imam Mahdi will return at the head of the forces of righteousness and do battle with the forces of evil in one, final, apocalyptic battle." (There’s more where that came from….)

Sound familiar? It helps to explain why President Ahmadinejad sounds about as nutty as Christian haters like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Why not build nukes, flaunt your anti-Semitism, and call the Bush Administration’s bluff if you’re expecting the end of the world? The scary part is that U.S. President Bush shares this apocalyptic nightmare himself. Those close to him have reported that sees himself as a war president acting with the explicit approval of God. In his book Bush at War Bob Woodward quotes Bush as saying, “We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great nation.” Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas reported that Bush told him this:

“God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam Hussein, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.”

I think what the world needs right about now are wise leaders who rely on reason and the principles of humanism. We can do without such make-believe consultations with an imaginary God that promises wars and final judgments on those of different or no faith.

Ken Ham: Postmodern Relativist?

2006-01-30T21:20:00.000-08:00

In a series of feature articles prominently displayed on the Answers in Genesis (AiG) website, Creationist Ken Ham seems to promote a point of view that can best be described as postmodern relativism. In an article on searching for silver bullets, Ham writes:

“[U]ltimately, the [evolution versus creation] argument is about how you interpret the facts—and this depends upon your belief about history. The real difference is that we have different ‘histories’…, which we use to interpret the science and facts of the present.”

“Creationists and evolutionists… all have the same evidence—the same facts,” he insists in another article on evidentiary proof, emphasizing that our presuppositions frame how we interpret those facts. “Christians,” he writes, have the Bible and the stories therein provide “a set of presuppositions to build a way of thinking which enables [Christians] to interpret the evidence.” Evolutionists, on the other hand, “have certain beliefs about the past/present that they presuppose, e.g. no God... so they build a different way of thinking to interpret the evidence of the present.”

Ham thinks that creationists should point out that theories are driven by presuppositions rather than evidence. In this way, the creationist can not only justify his own set of interpretations over another but hopefully change people’s minds so that they, in effect, choose the biblical view of creation rather than the scientific view of evolution.

Is Ham channeling Foucault or Derrida here? His comments are strikingly similar to those made by postmodernists at war with Enlightenment principles. For those of us steeped in the scientific method, truth is objective, universal, and its predictions verifiable. Truth is not some warm fuzzy that emerges from tribal customs, pragmatism, or the a priori dictates of a godless worldview. As Richard Rorty put it, truth is “something to be pursued for its own sake, not because it will be good for oneself, or for one’s real or imaginary community.”

We naturalists do not want to preordain our conclusion by privileging a certain way of looking at facts. We want to go where the evidence leads. Postmodern relativism holds that science is wrong to promote universal theories over the many multicultural and local viewpoints. They say that since science has no more of a foundation than personal interpretation of facts and sources there can be no single truth. There are instead only competing contingent truths all informed by the cultural and philosophical presuppositions in which one is immersed. In other words, for postmodernity truth is nothing but an extension of power because after these culture clashes are over the winner essentially decides what is true.

Given that the facts do not lead to young-earth creationism, I guess it’s no surprise that Ham would retreat to the fuzzy “truthiness” of postmodern relativity. Having lost the argument for creation on the merits of the evidence, it’s easy to see why some creationists harbor the idea that a secular conspiracy promotes an erroneous truth in place of the real truth. But I wonder how many dedicated creationist readers of AiG’s web site agree with Ken Ham’s approach to truth, evidence and theory?

Aliens Are Coming

2006-01-25T19:20:00.000-08:00

The New York Times issues yet another in a series of found-another-planet-out-there articles that have been steadily coming in from astronomers around the world. In this case, the team reports that the new planet is the “the most Earthlike planet yet to be discovered.” It seems that it’s just a matter of time before we detect planets that can support life. And you know what that means. Aliens. No, not flying saucers but worlds in which intelligent beings are thriving. Since at least Lucretius in the first century BCE this idea has captured our imagination. In his epic poem On the Nature of Things he wrote:

"And now, if store of seeds there is so great that not whole life-times of the living can count the tale... [then it] must be confessed in other realms there are still other worlds, still other breeds of men, and other generations of the wild."

There is a unique theological conundrum here for Christians that Jews and Muslims escape: of what value is the incarnation if there are thousands (perhaps millions) of other worlds in the universe with intelligent life? Perhaps there were multiple incarnations—a million deaths on a million crosses—in a sort of macabre cosmological Groundhog Day.

Or maybe out of all of the “other breeds of men” we’re the only ones who screwed up so badly that God found it necessary to take on the form of a man, sacrifice himself as a blood offering, so that he could then turn around and take receipt of that offering as forgiveness for everyone. (That’s like a son who borrows a bunch of money from his father and so the father decides to pay the debt himself by withdrawing everything from his savings account on Tuesday and then depositing it back in on Wednesday. God is never diminished in the transaction.)

In any case, the aliens are coming. Christians had better get their story straight now so they’re on the same page when they finally arrive.

Is-Ought Problem

2006-01-22T16:11:00.000-08:00

Frank Walton writes: “Evolutionist Dr. Massimo Pigliucci writes, ‘It has been pretty obvious since Darwin that we, indeed, are nothing but machines.’ Obviously, then, there wouldn't be a problem if one machine ‘kills’ another machine. When an automobile slams and crashes into another automobile do we say that the cars murdered one another?”

Walton makes a very common mistake here, one that was first recognized by David Hume and which philosophers call the “is-ought problem” after Hume’s comment in Book 3 of his Treatise:

“In every system of morality… the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning… [and then] instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not.”

Hume goes on to say that an ought or ought not can never be deduced from an is or is not. In other words, a statement about a fact (or what is the case) does not entail a moral conclusion of what should be done or how we ought to react to the fact. In this case, Pigliucci’s ontological remark that human beings are machine-like does not lead to the moral conclusion that murder is justifiable. Walton inappropriately derives an ought from an is. This faulty thinking is another reason Kahlo was asked 17 times “If you don't believe in God, why care about anything?”

Trilemma Revisited

2006-01-19T09:43:00.000-08:00

My old friend J. P. Holding thinks I have committed a category mistake and provides a counter-argument of his own:

Peter claims that Jesus was God incarnate. He makes this claim based upon what he considers to be justifiable evidence. Jesus told him that He was God incarnate. Further, Jesus has fond memories of being God and when asked, His mother supports Jesus's claim. Jesus even passes a lie-detector test when asked whether or not He is God. Peter is also convinced that Jesus is a sane person and not prone to telling lies. Therefore, Peter's third-person claim to knowledge demonstrates that Jesus is (1) telling the truth, (2) not purposefully lying, and it is clear that (3) he does not misunderstand Jesus's assertion. Unfortunately, Jesus was actually Zeus incarnate rather than God incarnate. Jesus was actually descended from Zeus and His mother does not want Him to learn of His true origins.

Thus the analogy does not hold, and the problem remains: How could one be mistaken about being God incarnate? The very thing that needs to be answered is not even touched upon! The character and nature of the claims of Jesus are such that proof of being mistaken would all too easily come to pass! Still's comparison is completely irrelevant.

Incredibly Holding cannot imagine that someone with aspirations of divinity could be mistaken. Presumably they must either be lying through their teeth or certifiably insane. Was David Koresh insane to believe himself to be the Messiah? I wouldn’t say so. Sadly mistaken with visions of grandeur certainly but not insane. There’s also the late Grand Rabbi Menachem Schneerson who behaved the way the messiah should and did nothing to dissuade the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Brooklyn and around the world from believing otherwise. Or how about Sun Myung Moon who proclaimed in the 2002 Clouds of Witnesses statement that he is the “Savior, Messiah, Second Coming and True Parent,” i.e., God, of all humanity? These are just three of our contemporaries. There have been dozens of such figures throughout history--just like these three and Jesus--who believed themselves to be sons of gods, messiahs, demi-gods, or the Big Guy himself. I’m quite sure that many of these characters really were con-artists or just plain wacky. These are the people that C. S. Lewis no doubt had in mind when he formulated the trilemma. Like Holding and many others, Lewis gave too much benefit of the doubt to Jesus and too little to all others. But the truth is not so simple. Among the very devout there have been numerous serious, committed, sober and sane religious leaders who firmly believe themselves to be divine incarnations of one or another deity. Jesus joins that proud line of would-be saviors.

God and Values

2006-01-17T10:58:00.000-08:00

Jim posted on Lya Kahlo's fascinating experiment in which she visited Christian forums as an open atheist. Check it out if you haven’t done so already. She was asked, "If you don't believe in God, why care about anything?" a total of 17 times.

Some of us have been tempted to switch into full rant mode when naïve questions like these pop up. But I think it’s important for us nonbelievers to understand the motivation behind this question.First, in my experience to “believe in God” typically conflates two things. To believe in God is to believe that God exists and further to believe that such a being ought to be our ultimate concern. In the absence of this ultimate concern, then presumably nothing is of concern, nothing matters, and all is lost. Therefore for anything to have value, the implicit thinking goes, God must exist.

I think the way to go about responding to this question is to nudge the theist into seeing his or her mistaken assumption that without God nothing can have value. Ask the theist this hypothetical: “Let’s just suppose for a moment that God didn’t exist. Would you still love your parents?” Obviously everyone is going to say that they would. So there is at least one thing to care about even in the absence of God. The truth is, none of us know whether God exists or not and yet this ignorance doesn’t stop any of us from valuing family, friendships, and our communities. All of us care about an enormous number of things in our lives.

Hopefully, the naïve question of the believer can be a teaching moment. With luck they will come to see that we largely value the same things that they value and that our values have little or nothing to do with the existence of God. The question won’t go away anytime soon but we can help guide theists who ask it to a greater understanding of atheism. Or we can switch into rant mode and reinforce all of their stereotypes about atheists.