To me it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first-hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses. And if we doubt the certainty of everything which passes through the senses, how much more ought we to doubt things contrary to these senses — ribelli ad essi sensi — such as the existence of God or of the soul or similar things over which there is always dispute and contention. And in fact it happens that whenever reason is wanting men to cry out against one another, which does not happen with certainties. For this reason we shall say that where the cry of controversy is heard, there is no true science, because the truth has one single end and when this is published, argument is destroyed for ever. — Leonardo Da Vinci
I have found no confession of faith to which I could ally myself without reservation. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Near the end of life)
Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is. — Friedrich Nietzsche
I had no need of that hypothesis. — Pierre-Simon Laplace
“Do you believe in a god?” “No.” Atty. Connolly then asked the court what God he meant, whereupon Judge Hayden replied, God Almighty. Here Sidis said that the kind of a God that he did not believe in was the “big boss of the Christians,” adding that he believed in something that is in a way apart from a human being. — About William James Sidis with the negation, the “No,” coming from Sidis
Theology is the study of God, in particular, or of the divine, in general. The most prominent discipline fractionation of theology is Christian theology. A common notion within the Christian faith throughout its sects comes in the assertion of the Virgin Birth of Christ. In fact, this gets taken as a proof of the divinity of Christ, of Yeshua, as the Son of God or God made flesh.
The idea comes from Christian theology with the Son of Man, Son of God, emergent as a source of both divinity and full humanity. As in Christian Humanism, Christ is the only fully human human being.
By mainstream Christian standards, Christian Humanism, certainly, comes as a surprise to many secular people, and many religious people, if they know about it. Most will not know about it. In fact, if people know about anything, they know about Christianity first, Humanism second, and Christian Humanism third.
A Christianity of “civilization,” of “human nature,” of “kindness,” of humanitas; in this sense, a self-understanding of oneself and others would be a source of paideia or (deep) education. A self-understanding of oneself and others through the personhood, the identity, of Christ, the anointed one, or through the flesh-made God identity of existence itself, or Jesus Christ as identified with the ground of being itself.
Any formulation of a Christian Humanism would bias an understanding of Humanism or bind it within the confines of Christian narrative, or metanarrative rather, where this would restrict conceptualizations by a limit of possible options and constraining that which could be considered virtuous to the tales of one era, one person, one tribe.
We are becoming human, while Christ was fully human. In this manner, we come to existence as Christ-like, in degrees, with the aim of a Christian life to become like Christ or as Christ without ever reaching the apex of humanity, Christ as the Son of God.
God creates human beings in this Christian Humanism incompletely human, commands them to be fully human, while inherently, by the laws of existence or God’s Law, coming to life with the inability to become fully human. A form of inveterate, in perpetuity, cruelty.
These theological issues or concerns grounded in theology stand tall, firm, fixed, and proud in the mantle of the study of God with the premise as the assumption of a god and then working from second principles to define such an entity. A being as a person, as eternal, omnipresent, a creator, as omnipotent, omniscient, self-existent (aseitous), and a sustainer with simple assertions of this as the fact of the matter, so working from second ‘principles,’ not first.
Theological concerns while not modern issues, though contemporary through inertia of historical processes of intellectual stagnation motioning towards the present due to the repetition of one male parrot to another male parrot, sluggishly burdening advancements around them, as if the divine enforcers of the Archangel of Boredom.
Theology, as the study of God, the Logos itself, or the divine Cogito, appears in so many formulations as to boggle the mind. Similarly, one finds this in the principled and detached-reality thought surrounding the Resurrection of Christ.
A God-man who died on a cross, or the Cross, for the Sins of Mankind who brought forth the Kingdom of God to the earthly dimensions of Man for a forgiveness of Sins forever and always for whoever shall submit themselves to the sacrificial witness of God Himself.
Flesh cages, prisons, of meat, bone, blood, brain, and skin, confining the reality of God written on the hearts of men and experienced in the soul of every human being. These forms of language tap into the orientation of the minds beholden to ancient mythology.
Capitalizations for effect. Signifiers repeated for impact. Strings of ungrounded concepts for both further effect and impact, or for pseudo-profundity. All this within the remit of significant portions of the global population, including the wealthy and powerful leaders around the world over many eras. One can recall the Divine Right of Kings so as to further entrench this political tool.
Every turn of phrase and punch of word triggering deeply unconscious, powerful and sincere emotions, sensitivities, within god-based sensibilities. That which is hoped for and remains unseen. The virgin birth of Jesus and the resurrection of Christ are significant theological issues in Christianity.
As with Nietzsche, and more powerfully, they have been written and read in blood. Not only this, and beyond the good and evil of Nietzsche’s “good” and “evil,” as in a trans-transvaluation of values, simply as a factual matter in other words, they have lead to blood, in the tonnage. Even there, it may be an inadequate descriptor, as such.
It’s a blood faith, a bloody religion, build on the sacrifice of a human being akin to animal sacrifices of old, while, within the framework of the theology, considered both a sacrifice of half of a god and half of a man in one being, while, at the same time, the sacrifice of God as a whole as a particular rather than a general point of existence with a specific worldline, such is the arithmetic of godhood.
Although, Nietzsche, had some piercing and negative commentary, succinct, on the looking at reproduction as sinful, as an act, at life as a works-project for an afterlife, and the valuation of death over life, or a death-oriented religion, as Cornel West notes, “Learning how to die,” a devout Christian himself in the prophetic and anti-Constantinian strain.
Most biblical historians, secular and religious, appear to take in the idea of Christ, Ben Yosef, as a real figure, charismatic, intelligent, and revolutionary, while disagreeing on supernatural powers, healing abilities, ability to prophesy, and divinity as in an incarnate form or flesh-form of the God of the Bible or the God of Abraham (and Isaac).
In the more modern comprehension of the world, the supernatural properties, the magic tricks with import and impact on individual health. Science or modern empiricism comes to the tentative conclusion of a natural world of objects and subjects, not a supernatural world of object and subjects, and then supernaturalistic, transcendental subjects acting in a supernormal manner on the natural subjects and objects.
Leaving the claims of magic to the side, in the dust, on the side of the highway, even in the ICU on life support, awaiting the grim reaper to come and take them kindly as the gate continues to close asymptotically, the world of nature is the world of the natural, while the world of the natural appears the world of the possible and impossible as the probabilistic and improbabilistic.
Laws of the universe set boundaries on the world, as such, as in the sphere of that which exists. The claim of the supernatural in regards to the workings of the world remain possible while forever unverified and, therefore, not infinitely but gargantuan-sized finite levels of the improbable if not the outright meaningless. Echoes of “colorless green ideas” in this hall of ancients.
By this natural deduction, we come to the idea of the claims of faith as not truly faith-based claims, where the discourse foundational to and on the nature of faith itself becomes a hall of mirrors reflecting a single aperture of the False. A mirage-like effect covering that which exists right outside if one would brave the cold.
Verity! Too bright for too many centuries, one might assume. Faith requires no evidence, while claims exist about reality and, therefore, pertain to that which exists, and so become something of the evident or about the empirical.
Because the ideas about the real contain implicit information or structural knowledge about the rules and contents of the real, so as to constrain the claims. It’s not that faith exists, but that faith exists only to the Empty Set Mind, of which no minds exist and no mind coincides (or all minds are co-extensive in a meaningless sense, or both).
Faith-based, or religious communities, amount more to minimalist evidence communities, properly defined and understood, instead of the long-term and common — several generations and eras — wrong definition of that belief held without evidence.
Religious beliefs, including the Christian and the Christian humanist, worldviews belong to a properly denominated category of minimalist belief structures in terms of informational content. Hence, they amount to low-information, or low-evidence, low-fidelity viewpoints, which becomes a common qualifying metric of the ignorant, not idiotic as many of the brightest lights belonged to the earthly armies of God Almighty while failing mightily, and sets the stage for the insane or the nonsensical, as in no sense or minimal sensory information taken into account.
In turn, this better explains the Christian psychology, as based on a logic of irrationality. One devised and designed within the framework of minimal information connected to the properly defined real, as opposed to the unreal, given by the scientific method.
Its antithesis in the unreal does not become maximal information, as information implies that which pertains to content, of which the unreal does not have, and of which the Christian worldview deals by the barrels and the Christian humanist perspective dishes out merely by buckets.
Theology, as well, its bases in the unreal, as in that which defines the real by the properly deemed unreal, statistically so, equates to a grounding in the idea of the opposition to reality, or unreality equates to reality in theological terms because of the claimed super-natural, truly the extranatural, as in not necessary, as equitable with the natural. However, it’s “extra-.” It is not needed; it adds nothing (or little).
Theology as an inversion of the way to know the world, as the study of God; the discipline of theology, as the study of the unreal claimed as the real, becomes a field of minimalist evidence belief structures or the metaphysics of (mostly) nothing claimed as everything, Q.E.D. In turn, theology fails; or, theology adds nothing, while claims to deliver everything and, in some cases, to deliver us, in turn.
It’s not that no god existed in the corners to be discovered in reality or a god existed and retreated, or was here once and then disappeared; it’s that the gods, as such, aren’t here, as they never left, because they were never here.
Magical thinking has been one term set to encapsulate the idea of religious ideologies and beliefs as the fundamental basis of human irrationality exhibited in religious ideologies, or dogmatic ones perceived in the state-based worships based on low-information or minimalist evidence belief structures.
Minimalist evidence communities asserting minimalist evidence worldviews as the highest valued, most virtuous, views with the maximal evidence perspective only inhered in the very presence of God Himself, as the entity of omniscience or perfect knowledge (and potentially foreknowledge) in which that which exists, the self-evident and the evident, is contained perfectly and only in the mind of God.
The mind of God as that which one will want to worship, or the worship of the maximal, through the minimalist evidence philosophy. That which one strives against, individually, evidence, for a minimal evidence worldview, is the opposite of that which one wants to worship, that which inheres with property omniscience or the maximal mind in terms of the evident and the self-evident, or God Himself, a strange counter-union. Perhaps, opposites attract; lovers by repulsion.
Individuals worship God on the basis of “faith,” as defined by an absence of evidence, more accurately means minimalist evidence propositions or premises, as in looking to the reduction of constraints of evidence to the lowest reasonable levels in which the gap may be perceived for the, rather massive, “leap of faith.”
Even “reasonable faith,” it means a mostly minimalist evidence worldview, while utterly within some of the arguments, in which arguments constrained little by the evidence become proposed, even the most popular arguments hinging on contingency with the idea of the unmoved mover, first principle, prime mover, final form or first form, the non-contingent, or the aseitous or the being with property aseity.
If contingent things exist, then a non-contingent thing exists; contingent things exist; therefore, a non-contingent thing exists, as every contingent thing depends on other contingent things until one comes to the non-contingent. To some, the greatest discovery ever or the most important argument in a theological arsenal in defense of the divine.
This poverty of intellect and wealth in effort for generation after generation; this empty flappers ball comprised of interlocutors looking at a nicely dressed suit on display and talking to it as if there’s a man present, when, in fact, there’s no there there, i.e., simply the nice exterior suit on display with nary the man in it to be seen.
It’s not using supernaturalism, except at the endpoint by definition and not by fact, but, rather, logic deduced from minimalist evidence because the world appears constructed in such a manner as to contain a series of contingent spatiotemporal events with some called objects and others deemed subjects. Each and every one with particular worldlines through reality.
Each running back to some eventuation of the start of everything, where the “start of everything” is God or “the unmoved mover, first principle, prime mover, final form or first form, the non-contingent, or the aseitous or the being with property aseity.” Not a helpful argument, however, it takes the facts of reality first, as a tip of the proverbial hat, without helping explain them that much.
One can run the course with these in terms of the “faith” arguments, the “reasonable faith” arguments, and the like; the presentation seems evidently clear as not “faith” formulations of arguments, but, instead, the arguments by minimalist evidence, i.e., theology. What are the smallest possible pieces of evidence presentable for the arguments towards or for, while not in closure of explanation of, the theity?
By minimalist evidence philosophy, this means the constructs informing mind, including words for no things, or imagery expanded to come to define a nothing, require some minimal evidence or sensory-based impressions for the thought, where thought is motion without motion and comes equipped with some informational content to come to claims even faith-premised ones in which faith, by this derivation, become minimalist evidence arguments and not no evidence arguments.
The Theity of Abraham and Isaac, of Noah and Methuselah, of Mary and Joseph, of the New Testament and the Old Testament, or the God of maximal comprehension of the evidence of existence. It’s one of the strange connections of the believers, the leaders, and the hypothesis of the divine.
Both former basing their worldviews on the arguments from minimalist evidence or low-information perspectives for worship of the maximally knowledgeable, the omniscient, or that with maximally evidenced comprehension.
A divergent self-negation in the form of bringing information for oneself to the lowest while worship of a hypothetical being claimed as having information to the highest. Something that one worships collectively and individually, while striving against an evidential framework individually to the utmost.
Perhaps, this could be seen as one of the sin-states as striving to be like God is sinful, so working to having the Empty Set Mind as one’s own vacuous mind becomes the highest ideal in the worship of the Totality of Knowledge and Foreknowledge called “God.”
The unreal, the low information views, faith arguments, the reasonable faith arguments, the minimalist evidenced worldviews, these remain all of a piece. All of a tapestry teleo-tropically— with teleo-tropism — oriented towards the fixedness of the god(s) concept, or, more properly, oriented towards the cultural, era, and people group, orbits and rotations of the god(s) concept.
The god(s) idea is differentiated in such a large finite as if to seem infinite because the god(s) idea is a poorly defined idea. Some concept more or less defining human lack in particular capacities made infinite, claimed as fundamental rather than derivative in some transcendental being, and divinizing human needs in this psychologically anthropomorphic entity (or entities), a thirst never quenched, except in the objectification of the self through an inversion of human limitations converted into the external where the lacks and needs are objectified, personified as external, and made omni-infinite (“eternal, omnipresent, a creator, as omnipotent, omniscient, self-existent (aseitous), and a sustainer”).
It is human psychology inverted and then externalized, and then claimed as the base of existence. An apparent objective argument for divine attributes as some abstract God is an anthropomorphic entity, too, in the aforementioned manner of inversion-externalization made the ‘ground of being’ or some such item. Similarly, claims of a virgin birth reflect the minimal evidence worldviews mentioned above. The Resurrection of Christ within the same mode of thinking.
In that, both stand as the highest claimed evidence for the divinity of Christ, as foundational to the Christian worldview, in fact ethic, while violating known processes in biology with reproduction, in physics with thermodynamics, in biology with cessation of physiological processes leading inextricably to the physical, as the boundary between life and non-life or the physiological and the physical is only them, i.e., the physiological lead to the physical or set the boundary between the living and the dead, the biological and the material.
The lowest forms of reasoning raised as the highest, and given the aura of the holy or the divine to reduce proper scrutiny and clarity on the empty claims asserted as the basis for entire philosophical systems to make for those who strive against evidence in matters deemed of first-rate importance as bases for the existence of the omniscient, i.e., theology as a means by which the sentient strive, diligently so, for the a-scient while worshipping the omni-scient. The lowest deemed the highest, the real seen as the unreal, unreality claim as reality, this is the legacy and telos of theology.
Its final destination of the abode of Thanatos, of itself; the teleology of theology is death, always has been: Theology is a form of self-thanatology played to the tune of history, as the words of the Word are claimed as the “Spirit who gives life” and, in fact, once more invert the real as truly the unreal, because the ‘Spirit,’ as Jesus, as YHWH, as the Word, brings death unto itself, eventually.
Photo by Davide Cantelli on Unsplash
