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Job, Genesis and Easter -
Traversing the Icy Plain of Deism
By
Jay B. Gaskill
My disclaimer:
This is not one more of those ‘arguments for God’. It really isn’t an argument at all, just a brief exposition of my take on the most important of the ultimate questions -- and an unfairly condensed one at that. I’m assuming that the title makes some initial sense to the reader – otherwise you might not be reading this at all. I took for granted, for example, that a belief in deism – understood as the world view where the Creator Deity designed and made the universe “Go!”, then left it alone to “do its thing” – would seem like life on an icy plain, compared to the richly textured and engaged biblical deity who led Moses and rescued Jesus. And I am hoping you are reading this out of a sense of inquiry. If – as I am now convinced – God is real and potentially present to us, then narratives like mine are like the testimony of witnesses to a comet that not everyone can see…
Excerpts ---
Our Enhanced View
From a sufficient distance, we humans are privileged to a view of the world and the universe in which it resides that has been powerfully amplified by technology and science. This view reveals that our universe has been unfolding according to a general template, one that includes the physical laws. This is a template that is implied by (or can be reverse engineered from) the actual course of events over the eons.
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In my own journey, this vision of a universe suffused with emergent design and value suggested a divine reality that went well beyond the deist’s disembodied, eternal architect, the “Watchmaker God”.
After all, a
value system is the toolkit for caring intelligent beings capable of assigning value and of adapting our behaviors to conform to our values. When we discover the deep taproot of moral values as a sort of pregnant ‘given’ as it were, as part of the developmental architecture of being, we encounter a not-so-hidden message.
Value, the very sense of “ought”, necessarily implies a conscious caring about ‘rightness”. The very notion of caring, especially the capacity for empathy and compassion, belongs to a suite of faculties we associate only with
person or
personality. I concluded that
the existence of a source code implied a Source and that the Source is not impersonal.
Coterminous with this insight, I made an independent discovery; it was the introspective sense of encounter with a caring extrinsic persona worthy of ultimate reverence. I soon concluded that my recognition of an active, conscious, leavening presence among us was hardly unique – there were many recorded instances of essentially the same experience, both within or outside the nominally religious frameworks. On the basis of these two kinds insights (of deep internal apperception pointing to external being and the external apperception illuminating internal being), suddenly all of the stridently atheistic claims of the Freudian atheists were inherently suspect.
It seemed to me that the claim that any brush with the Eternal can dismissed as a psychological problem was a form of Freudian self delusion. When seen from the position of the reasonable observer, Freud’s strong reaction against the very notion of God was an attempt to “clinicalize” an inherently benign human faculty as if it were some malign thought disorder. It revealed to me a sort of neurotic, faux-reasoning, something of the order, “I hate God; but it is immoral to hate God; therefore I conclude that there is no God”.
Of course I am not trying to suggest here that, just because many atheists have hidden ‘issues” that profoundly distort and impede their ability to ‘read’ reality, that all do. Nor was I suggesting that the other, reasonably minded doubters and agnostics are similarly affected, or that atheism as a life stance can be discredited merely as a psychological aberration. But I am persuaded that the notion that belief in God can be similarly dismissed on psychological grounds is clearly false. And I am also persuaded that there is a sort of cultural fog among the modern intelligentsia that blocks aspects of human apperception as the products of “superstition”, allowing the few that “get though” then to be dismissed as “mere wish fulfillment” or “psychological but not real”. The root of all this is the quasi-religious doctrine of arch-materialism, something I’ve addressed in depth elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the glory of a Bach fugue cannot be reduced to “air pressure fluctuations” that elicit certain “electro-chemical neurological changes in some subjects.”
The purely physical-mechanical accounts of nature and human are powerfully descriptive on one level, but having elided meaning from the account, their adoption as a comprehensive world view constitutes a sort of self-induced autism of the soul..
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More >>>> http://jaygaskill.com/DivineTemplate.pdf
Jay B. Gaskill
