In search of the first scientific empirical experimental theology in history!

Ahem. Yes.

I've had this curious phrase, "the world's first scientific empirical experimental theology in history," written on my whiteboard for some weeks now. Partly because the excess of adjectives makes it so endearingly enthusiastic, but mostly because I'm trying to figure out exactly what it means.

It's a phrase of Timothy Leary's, from an obscure early book called NeuroLogic, describing his ambition for his eight-circuit model of consciousness. But what on Earth is a scientific theology, and why would anyone want one?

Abraham Maslow, with his more restrained phrasing, sheds some light on it: "we may be able to accept the basic religious questions as a proper part of the jurisdiction of science once science is broadened and redefined." That is, neither of them accepts that "spirituality," whatever that might be, should be exclusively in the hands of the theologians. It's an aspect of human experience, and so it belongs to the psychologists. But where Maslow seems, tactfully, to be suggesting that we take God out of religion and do away with Him entirely, Leary seems to want to put Him into science. Both are about equally prone to saying either that religion is obsolete, or that everything is religious.

Which brings me back to a problem I keep encountering: that "God" is getting more and more vaguely defined by the day. Everybody from physicists to theologians uses "God" as a metaphor - but what is it a metaphor for?

There's a feeling amongst the religious that the subtlety of modern theology isn't understood by their critics. The criticism I keep hearing of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion is that "he obviously doesn't know anything about modern theology." So what is modern theology? Paul Tillich, of whom I hear so much in lectures and debates, has this to say about God: "God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence." And he refuses to define religion any more specifically than "concern with ultimate concerns." On the subject of why someone would choose to express this concern in organised religion, he says that "symbols open up something in us." Similarly, John Hick sees religion as "our human response to a transcendent reality, the reality that we call 'God'," and advocates Christianity only insofar as it is the "best fit" for somebody raised in a Christian culture. In other words, religion is a set of useful metaphors, and God is some impersonal universal force.

Which, funnily enough, sounds exactly like the kind of God-as-metaphor that Dawkins discusses in the very first chapter of his book - the God of Einstein and Spinoza, of which he says:

The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

But if nobody now claims to believe in the God of ordinary language, where do we stand? What's the difference between Leary's and Maslow's and Tillich's and Einstein's and Dawkins' religions?

Practically, though, the answer to this is the answer Dawkins gives - that whatever the philosophers believe is irrelevant, because there are about 3 billion people out there who do believe in a miracle-wreaking, sin-punishing personal God.

Blog for the lazy.

As somebody kindly pointed out, I should be writing university assignments, and have no right at all to be starting blogs.

So, today it's a blog for the lazy. I'll post a couple of pictures, you can have a look at them, and there'll be no pressure on either of us.


OK?


This came to mind because it's been a wonderful 24 hours for randomly-beautiful things. Like these photographs I took last night - of drips of candle-wax, formed by falling into cold water.

And these, which are by-products of a program I made for a statistics assignment.

It works by laying down three functions on top of each other, each with lots of random variables, so that every time you hit the key, you get a completely different random 'landscape.' Alright, a somewhat different random 'landscape,' at least.

This program has been very distracting. I've been sitting with it for hours like some kind of aesthete- -pigeon, compulsively pressing the button for a new pretty picture.

It's certainly much more fun than the rather tedious unbeatable noughts-and-crosses machine I made a few years ago (misguidely thinking, I suppose, that what we need in our everyday lives is a really efficient way of losing at noughts and crosses..?).

In retrospect, it would have been much improved by some random element which unexpectedly let you win, just as you'd concluded that it was mathematically impossible... or another which unexpectedly starting playing backgammon or telling rude jokes, after consistently playing noughts and crosses a couple of hundred times.

I obviously had no imagination in those days!

dronf

OK, dronf is a rather silly word.

It's even sillier than fnord, which is so silly that Merriam Webster refuses to define it, while Wikipedia calls it a "nonsensical term."

But, like all the best silly things, it has hidden depths.

A fnord is supposedly a subliminal message, found in newspapers, textbooks, TV, radio and so on, to which we've all been conditioned to respond with a feeling of vague, unfocussed anxiety, and an inclination not to think about it. The only place you don't find fnords is advertisements.

It's a metaphor for the chronic, low-grade sense of emergency we live with. The water shortage, global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorism, anti-terrorism - it seems we're witnessing the planetary endgame. With one hand, the media sustains the hum of crisis, while with the other it offers us comfort food, mindless TV, pleasant minor worries. Despair or distraction.

So a dronf is a metaphor for the third way. It's whatever can create in us a chronic, low-grade sense of optimism. It's whatever can induce us not to ignore or despair at our problems, but to confront them.

Everybody else is doing it, so why can't I?

Hello, and welcome to yet another blog!

There's something off-puttingly self-indulgent about blogs, which usually, well, puts me off them. But I've decided to give in to the temptation to make one. After all, my own Dad has been blogging shamelessly for months now with no ill effects, and as a person who believes in communities, it seems odd not to be a part of the global community.

So this blog will be about whatever I have to contribute to the "global conversation" - the things I know, the things I'm trying to figure out, and the things I just want to share. I'm a student, interested in religion, mathematics and psychology, so these are probably what I'll talk about most.

And tomorrow, I'll explain what a "dronf" is...