Oranges and minor miracles

[da]

This evening I paid a visit to see lovecraftienne, persephoneplace, and joymoose, and to drop off some oranges as a thank-you for watching Rover a week ago.

One reason among many I like these folks is that they ask wonderful questions. So we were talking about the Quaker gathering I was at with melted_snowball this weekend, and the question came up, how is being an atheist Quaker different from being a Quaker who believes in God?

To begin with, I do think there are differences. In the Quaker experience, people learn to do verbal translations all the time. A Christian Quaker might say "the Inner Christ", another Quaker will understand that to mean "that of God within," a third might translate the same as "the Inner Light". This translation process is fundamental, since Quakerism is Experiential (that is, one is not called to believe any doctrine that doesn't stand up to being tested against one's deepest soul/heart). When I'm translating, some things get left aside, the parts that don't speak to me at that time. In Quaker Meeting, we're trying to recognize and speak to the Eternal within each other; understanding the words is only part but it's an essential part.

An irreverent description I've heard for the process is "listening in tongues".

Going back to atheist Friends: there are translations I don't know how to make, going from theistic Quaker speech to atheist Quaker speech. The two I thought of in the discussion were miracles and blessings, things I can't explain in rational language without invoking the placebo effect. So, sure, it's possible that random events can seem like signs when you're paying attention to them. And a strictly rational person can say that the subconscious mind makes connections that the conscious mind cannot, so intuitive choices can feel like one was guided by something outside one's consciousness.

But by definition, faith goes further than rational explanation. As I was reminded a number of times this weekend, having faith to take a step when there's no evidence that the step should hold can be tremendously rewarding. Not necessarily at first; part of the faith is to keep going, and the claim (which, in all truth, I've not tested completely myself) is that the faith will be enough to keep you going so long as you follow what God wants you to do and continue to have faith. So there it is. A little work, plus faith, turns into the God Perpetual Motion Machine. How irrational is that? How can an atheist internalize this and use it? It is a miracle (if indeed miracles exist), and I believe it is one of the fundamental things that Friends ask for, say, when we gather to make decisions (which are meant to be coming to Unity with God's wishes for the collected body; instead of unity with each other).

So, that's my inconclusive thoughts about Atheist Quakers.



I'd welcome comments and other opinions on this; I feel like I'm oversimplifying the strong atheist position.

Comments

[persephoneplace.livejournal.com]

I really enjoy talking to you about this stuff. I am going to think about this today and see if I can come back with some other thoughts about it.

[persephoneplace.livejournal.com]

i am thinking, but haven't had caffeine yet, so can't draw clear connections - that there might be a parallel with Buddhism as a philosophy, rather than Buddhists who think that the Buddha was divine.

any thoughts?

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Hm. I'll have to think about that, too. I think it's closer to "Buddhism as a philosophy" rather than "Buddhism as a faith," including anything about reincarnation- which is a problematic statement, too, because anything about Karma and Nirvana seem pretty tied to faith.

Perhaps it's merely a question of semantics; but I'd just like to get my mind around the semantics. :)

[poeticalpanther.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed the discussion very much, too. Hope you didn't feel too challenged about your beliefs - I just get curious about stuff.

As to what you've said...pondering.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Hope you didn't feel too challenged about your beliefs

The opposite, in fact- I enjoyed the conversation last night quite a bit, because it brought up new perspectives on things I've been thinking about. I'm quite interested in the questions, whether or not they have answers. It's quite possible that they don't; they might only lead to other questions.

Faith

[pnijjar.livejournal.com]

Even atheists are not omniscient. They may have knowledge that God doesn't exist (I guess..) but they don't know everything in the universe or even in their own lives. Furthermore, they have to make decisions under uncertainty. It seems to me that faith means "making an uncertain decision with the (necessarily unreasoned) belief that the decision is beneficial".

It is possible to make decisions without faith -- given a set of choices with no supporting evidence, make a decision arbitrarily (or randomly) and have no expectations for it being beneficial. So where does atheistic faith come from? Here's one idea: an atheist might think of reality as some system determined by probabilities, where some of the random variables are hidden.

There is some system going on and the system has rules, but we don't know the rules and don't have enough data to "learn the model". Faith means we believe that such a system exists, and that following our hearts will lead to good outcomes in this system, even if we don't understand why.

A blessing in this system means some positive event that we do not predict, but which we (irrationally) believe is a property of the system, as opposed to "luck", which has connotations of some low-probability event happening. I would think that "miracle" has some sense of low-probability associated with it, maybe combined with properties of the system?

I don't know whether that is a sensible explanation or not, but it does not require existence in God in order to work. It also jives with what you have written about Quakerism: "unity with God" is "behaving in accordance to the unknown rules of the universe". The key for an atheist is that you don't need any kind of God twiddling knobs or pulling strings -- reality is what it is, and it's our job to listen to reality and act in accordance with its laws.

I think of non-religious Buddhism in much the same way, but I think I am on shakier ground there. Unless you define Nirvana as "being wholly in tune with the workings of the universe", I am not sure the concept makes sense.

Disclaimer: I know actually know anything about Quakerism, Buddhism, atheism,
or reasoning under uncertainty.

Re: Faith

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Paul! Yay.

This explanation is useful to me, I think.

...I'm not entirely sure it's complete, because one can argue that such an allowance for unknown (or unknowable) rules is more agnosticism than atheism; a sort of "strong agnostism" that one doesn't know what one doesn't know, so how can one make claims about it, other than to describe its effects on oneself?

Or, the argument can be made that these rules suggest a non-agnostic, non-atheist Belief in an unknowable/ineffible mystery, which is getting awfully close to the kind of faith I find most defendable. Theism, but not Deism, I suppose- where the word "God" stands in for everything that we can't possibly know, but be know is there.

Re: Faith

[dpolicar]

Ah!

Reading this helps me make more sense of the conversation we're having below.

Yes, if an atheist in this conversation is someone who believes they need make no allowance for unknown rules or mystery, then I think I agree with you that no translation between the atheist and the theist is possible. But I wonder if the definition you're using here actually describes the people we started out calling "atheist Friends".

I also find that definition of atheist amusing, in that it is very similar to the definition I think many atheists have of theists -- that is, the same attribution of complacency is made. I'm not sure it's entirely fair in either sense.

Re: Faith

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't think it's terribly fair to paint that restrictive a picture for atheists; it was just an idea I was trying out... and definitely not what I was thinking about in our discussion below.

I do vaguely wonder what would happen if somebody with that degree of certainty about the universe tried to become involved with a Quaker Meeting.

Re: Faith

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

for everything that we can't possibly know, but we know is there.

...and by this I meant the royal 'we'... I probably should've said "the theist". I didn't intend to make claims for your belief!

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I have said to you (and will say here) that I actually have the hardest time with atheist Friends when it comes to Quaker discernment. If Friends are attempting in our Meetings for worship with a concern for business to discern where God is calling us, what's a nontheist Friend doing?

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about this in the shower this morning. One unsatisfying answer is, "whatever God wants them to do," which is unsatisfying because there's no choice or free will involved.

Another unsatisfying answer is: "nothing more than consensus".

However, a third argument could be: Suppose there is an Inner Light accessable to all people, if they are willing to reach for it. Certainly Quakers don't require particular labels for this Inner Light; if somebody is using their deepest heart in the Meeting for Worship, who am I (or who is anyone) to say it is (or isn't) the divine, if it is indeed their deepest heart? Perhaps atheist Quakers in Business Meeting are able to make the translation, whether or not they, or anyone else, can rationally explain it.

On the balance this doesn't sound as bad to me as it did when I first considered it. It requires additional Faith from theist Friends that their nontheist cohorts are reaching the same Light. It requires acceptance from the nontheists that the theists are translating their ineffible innermost selves into beliefs that they don't believe in (and not be turned off by that; which isn't so weird if you consider the possible unity between Christian and non-Christian Friends). And also it requires the nontheists to do a lot of searching (I was going to say soul-searching) to make the truths of theists fit something in their experience, instead of just discarding them. Because if a nontheist Friend is going to go cherry-picking beliefs, they're probably not doing what we'd like them to do in Business Meeting.

Being a theist Friend, I suppose one last thing it requires is for this state of affairs to be the will of God; and this overall argument at least satisfies my internal tests for what I would consider reasonable.

It's certainly worth thinking about some more.

[dpolicar]

This business of religious "translation" is something I'm accustomed to in general... I was an Orthodox Jew in my youth, and that's still the ritual form I'm most comfortable with, but I attend other services from time to time, and look for ways to find meaning in them.

As for translating into and out of the atheist vernacular, in particular... my position boils down to acknowledging that we are part of a system far more complex than we are able to understand fully, and that what we perceive about that system and how we can change it depends quite a bit on the state of mind we approach it with.

One consequence: even if there exist no miraculous events (in whatever technical theological sense we wish to use), that doesn't necessarily mean that what a theist calls a miracle has no referent in the real world. It doesn't even mean that there's nothing I can learn/accomplish from approaching its referent as a "miracle" that I could not learn/accomplish by approaching it any other way.

The same thing is basically true of any other theological concept. Whether it strictly describes anything in the world or not, it may still be a effective concept to examine, or manipulate, the world in the context of.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks...

Whether it strictly describes anything in the world or not, it may still be a effective concept to examine, or manipulate, the world in the context of.

Yes, and I think the richest theology conversations can come from trying to form reasonable rules to live by out of events that don't seem to make any sense in "the real world". Like, say, miracle stories, Bible stories with all their contradictions, Zen koans.

[W]hat we perceive about that system and how we can change it depends quite a bit on the state of mind we approach it with.

Agreed, and I think this is where I have problems with translating into atheist terms.

Given an unexplainable event, a theist can ascribe agency to it. An atheist is forced to not ascribe agency, if I understand the atheist position.

The atheist can say it takes advantage of the complexity of the system in ways that they can't understand; but I don't see how that helps them make decisions.

[dpolicar]

Hm.

Suggest an event that you believe a theist, by ascribing divine agency to it, could usefully use as a guideline for decision-making but that an atheist, unable to ascribe such agency, cannot so use. Perhaps this will be easier to think about in the concrete.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

[I wrote four longish paragraphs of response from gmail, then hit the wrong button on the page, which deleted it all.

So, this is a shorter version.]

The most obvious example from a Quaker business meeting is the decision of whether to spend money that we don't have, on something we believe God wants us to do.

The general guideline for the theist is that God wants us to take leaps of faith when so commanded; if we do, resources we need will be provided in due time. The question of means is secondary to whether the action is a leading by God.

The atheist is in a much (I think) scarier position of making a rational decision factoring in both means and ends. Neither of which are primary concern for the theist; the ends don't need to be clear either.

In the balance, I believe this can lead to a conservative person making radical decisions without betraying any of their conservative principles, and without acquiescing to the group as I might otherwise expect from consensus decision-making.

[dpolicar]

Hm.

So, let me make sure I understand... as a theist in this position, it's not just that I believe that following God's will is more important than financial concerns, and therefore will risk bankrupcy to follow God's will. It's that I believe God will pay the bills as long as I follow his will, and therefore I'm not actually risking bankrupcy at all.

Yes? Did I understand you correctly?

Hm.
So, OK.

I can certainly translate this as far as saying "This needs doing, and I can do it, and therefore I will. If it bankrupts me, so be it." without invoking a deity.

I can translate this further as saying "This needs doing. I cannot do it all myself -- I do not have the resources. But what I can do, I will, in the hope that others will do the rest."

I can hypothetically translate this as far as saying "I am convinced that this need is genuine, and not just my personal quirk. I believe the existence of this need will call forth a response to it in others, just as it has in me, in proportion to their level of awareness... and therefore I believe that others will do the rest." This, again, does not require invoking a deity, although it does require invoking a certain commonality of human experience, an "inner light" as you note above.

I think this gets us pretty close to a mapping into the atheist vernacular. It seems to leave a gap only in cases where the problem to be addressed is beyond the reach of concerted human effort... cases where only divine intervention can suffice.

These cases are, I think, pretty rare... in fact, I can't think of one.

The closest I come is things like "The sun is going to go nova!" but even there I can imagine the nontheist taking action in the faith that human ingenuity etc. will address the problem as long as everyone acts with faith, boldness, and confidence... even if the individual nontheist has no coherent idea of what such a solution might look like.

So... am I missing something fundamental here? Because if I've understood the theist experience you're describing, it seems like there is an available nontheist translation.

That said, I should reiterate something I said before: the context we choose matters. Even if a nontheist translation exists, the theist formulation may be more emotionally compelling... something essential may be lost in the translation, causing the theists to be more effective at accomplishing things that need to be done than the nontheists are.

If that were true (which, for all I know, it might be) then a rational nontheist might legitimately conclude that becoming a theist is the practical thing to do, and to encourage others to do, whether god exists or not.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

So, let me make sure I understand... as a theist in this position, it's not just that I believe that following God's will is more important than financial concerns, and therefore will risk bankrupcy to follow God's will. It's that I believe God will pay the bills as long as I follow his will, and therefore I'm not actually risking bankrupcy at all.

Nope- the ends are just as secondary as the means. I'm totally risking bankruptcy in that situation. My assumption is that God's plans don't include bankruptcy. But if they do, then God will provide at that point, too.

I think there's an important point here which gets down exactly to your difference in context/state between the theist and atheist. In each moment of making a decision, the faithful theist attempts to determine God's will and to follow it. So in a sense, the faithful theist loses free will. But at the same time, following God's will depends on every one of their abilities including their full reason. (So perhaps their loss of agency is only to the extent that they gain in their faith? I won't try to argue that right now though.)

My argument, I suppose, is that the faithful theist's state of mind is different from the atheist's because they have faith. I think that difference is observed in how they make choices; and I agree with you that there might be losses in translation between atheist speech and theist speech.

This makes me grumpy, because I would like to argue that the differences are bridgable by translation, particularly for atheists in Quaker contexts.

This is a challenging set of things to think about, but good, I think. Apart from the intellectual part, I realize as I write that I personally wouldn't do very well in the "have faith no matter what" test.

[dpolicar]

OK. I'm going to sidestep the "God will provide" thread, because I think it leads quickly to "why does God allow bad things to happen?", which will take over this thread if allowed to. And I will attempt to sidestep the chasm that is free will, and stay on the narrow-path thread of translation.

I think translating from faith to lack-of-faith is at best difficult and more likely impossible. I think translating from having a set of moral values that define the good to having no such values is, similarly, difficult-or-impossible.

But I'm not sure any of that has anything to do with theism, necessarily. Perhaps it is easier, or more likely, for a theist to sustain faith or act in accordance with a set of values... or perhaps not... but either way that doesn't mean a nontheist can't understand the activity. There may be differences in how _compelling_ the two formulations are, but I'm not sure there's an unbridgable gap in understanding. And certainly, I would expect the sorts of nontheists who attend Quaker meetings to be several sigmas up the able-to-talk-about-faith-and-moral-values-cogently scale within the domain of nontheists. (This is similar to the sense in which, though men are on average more muscular than women, a given weight class can contain both male and female weightlifters.)

But here again, I find the more abstract we get, the harder it is for me to get a grip on the matter. Perhaps my problem is precisely that I'm not enough of a faithful theist to understand the thing that you feel is not getting translated.

But, OK, trying to respond to this in the same abstract terms... it seems to me that a nontheist who has a set of moral values that define the good and sets out to act in accordance with the good in a given situation, is in essentially the same position you describe here for a theist who has a set of intuitions about God's will and sets out to act in accordance with God's will in a given situation.

I'm not necessarily saying here that "the good as defined by one's moral values" and "God's will as one is able to discern it" are the same thing... or even that they are similar. The Galaxy is incommensurably larger than the Earth, and not very much like it in many important dimensions... however, both are so huge and pervasive relative to an individual person that in the context of the overwhelming majority of tasks we undertake, the differences don't matter. A nonGalaxist and a Galaxist might find they can still navigate a boat to the same place in the same way, even when one (correctly) understands the stars to be suns lightyears away, and the other has no such belief.

All that said, I don't know if I'm making much sense... and I'm also not sure I'm really understanding you. It's funny to be talking about whether understanding can span a conceptual bridge over that same conceptual bridge... :-)

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

It's funny to be talking about whether understanding can span a conceptual bridge over that same conceptual bridge...

Yes, it sure is. But it's fun, too, so I won't complain about the irony. :)

(By the way: atheist? nontheist? Yon wikipedia article suggests they are different but overlapping. Nontheist seems to be anyone for whom the question "is there a god?" is meaningless.
In case it wasn't your intent to include them, I'd like to do so, because I expect it doesn't complicate our discussion and the addition means we can include such people as Buddhist Quakers without worrying if they're actually atheists or if they just say mu.)

I'll come back to this tomorrow, 'cause my brain isn't coming up with anything useful.