Response to FFH: The God of the Philosophers is not Incompatible With Folk Religion

Substack is the home of free speech on the internet… Doesn’t this guy know he should allow open discussion for free in his comments?

I don’t usually make “debunk” articles, I just comment the debunk because I’m not looking to “pwn”. but I think I’m gonna start making them for those who do limit their comments sections to paid subscribers… I think I write good material in responses anyways.

Today I’m going after this article that appeared in my feed:

The Irrelevance of All Philosophical Proofs of God

Now, as something of a Platonist, I was a little bit thrown back by this. The entire premise behind Platonism is that the existence of God and his attributes (or really lack thereof) can *mostly* be derived from contemplation. There is a certain supra-rational element due to the real nature of God being beyond intelligible.

So, let’s get started with looking at passages from this text.

“The foundations of Western philosophy, therefore, promote scientific skepticism. The ambition was to obtain objective knowledge at any cost, even if that knowledge should prove subversive. This is why Western knowledge-seeking was called “philosophy,” the obsessive, potentially-exclusive love of wisdom. For example, Socrates was executed in part because his elitist interrogations were radical and damaging to Athenian democratic culture.”

The foundations of science do not come from “ambition to obtain objective knowledge”, quite the opposite if anything. There is a very distinct difference between “Natural Philosophy” and “Science”. Science arose during the 17th century, and it arose in the context of increasing skepticism not towards religion, but sensory information. Which, maybe in the context of Christendom, promotes religious skepticism, but this Rationalist philosophy was still largely pro-God. Francis Bacon’s scientific method is built on a premise that we are fundamentally naive to what is happening “out there”, that the phenomenal world is empirical. Physical reality is nothing more than a probability distribution, and I’m not saying that with reference to any theories about wave functions or quantum mechanics. I’m saying, our understanding of everything in science is point-estimations based on a satisfactory amount of observations (sample size). Basically, we are using the heuristic of “if something happens a lot of times given a certain set of conditions, those conditions will probably lead to the same result in the future as well”.

Also, Socrates was executed because he was considered overly friendly with the preceding tyrants of Athens. The reasons given in the trial were bullshit, it was a sham trial.

“But religion long predated that philosophical project. Before the patriarchy and imperialism of the world’s organized religions, there were childlike animism and shamanic magic, folklore and ancestral spirit veneration stretching back tens of thousands of years into the late Stone Age. It’s safe to suggest that most worshippers who’ve ever lived didn’t approach religion by drastically overthinking the matter, entertaining idle or self-destructive doubts and compensating with disingenuous apologetics.

Arguably, a crucial moment in the recorded history of religion was the Axial Age, which landed like a bombshell in the mid first millennium BCE. According to Robert Bellah’s use of Merlin Donald’s theory of cognitive change, that period was impacted by the inventions of the Greek alphabet and writing, which invited meta-level questioning, an analytical, theorizing mode of thought that overtook the earlier, analogical and narrative one. Instead of just taking their practices for granted by personifying and socializing with natural forces, people in Greece, India, China, the Levant, and Persia became more self-aware as they came to define themselves as distinct from an increasingly objectified world.”

Most worshippers today don’t entertain self-destructive doubts either unless exposed to atheism. The reason people become skeptical of religion comes out of a social presence of the anti-religious, be them atheists or dogmatists from another faith. Intuition, void of anti-religious arguments, lends someone to something like animism or classical Paganism presumably, depending on the disposition of their people I guess.

This “theory of cognitive change” sounds quite inconsistent. First of all, the Greek alphabet was not invented. It was simply borrowed from the Phoenicians, who borrowed their alphabet from the Sinaitic script, which originates over one thousand years prior to the Axial Age. Secondly, what is the etiology of such a change? It’s very sad that someone who I presume calls themselves a scientifically minded person is so quick to accept “theories of history” which shit in the face of the scientific method. In my opinion, the Axial Age certainly does exist in some sense, but it does not mark the beginning of a certain level of religious introspection. It has more to do with a certain anxiety about religion which either was uncommon or not well-recorded prior to this period. But its dating is highly arbitrary and even with a 600-year period fails to account for the great advances in the religions it takes credit for. The Avestan language of the Gathas is largely considered to be from the late 2nd millennium BC, which would suggest that the Gathas (which are allegedly composed by Zoroaster) were composed during early after the Indo-Iranic split and predate the Axial Age. Likewise, the Vedas are composed around 1500 BC based on the dating of Sanskrit, and while there is no shortage of Hindu philosophical literature from the Axial Age, many of the most important philosophers and works of Hinduism all date from long after the Axial Age ends. Shankara and Ramunja, and the Bhagavad Gita, to name some examples. Most Hindus consider the Vedas to be the source of Hinduism, not later philosophical treatises on them. Hinduism is essentially just the extraction of philosophical truth from the hymns of the Vedas. Obviously, these truths are expected to be logically grounded — it isn’t a revelatory faith like Christianity. Presocratic philosophy was heavily influenced by the Orphic mysteries, although it is difficult to date when exactly these mysteries emerged. If you are an Orpheus truther, then presumably during the Bronze Age, but otherwise it could very well have emerged during the Axial Age. It’s not particularly relevant when the Orphic mysteries emerged, since the whole argument here seems to be that the philosophers were running against the grain of religion and simply appeased religious authorities as much as they were comfortable with. The Ancient Egyptians already had a very rich religious tradition long before the Axial Age, addressing the need for a metaphysic in ways which would be reflected in later religious philosophies. The philosophical inquiries of the Abrahamic religions and their Gnostic half-cousins largely arose during or after Hellenistic Judaism, which mostly postdates the Axial Age. The idea that Jews and their one God are indicative of some sort of profound mental shift of humanity is debatable, they were mostly an irrelevant and scorned people before Abrahamic religions took off. We don’t look at weird groups like the Pirahã today and conclude that their weird beliefs must indicate a broader change in human thought across civilizations.

The simplest explanation for why various world religions and philosophies today have their roots in the “Axial Age” is simply that we don’t have extensive records about religion before the Iron Age. This is hardly indicative of a lack of religious introspection, because most modern scripture was originally orally composed and orally passed on. This was true in the ancient world as well. The Celtic Druids are mentioned as being philosophers of renown, who are literate in Greek, but refuse to write down their beliefs. In fact, a very important element of the religious elite in the ancient world was their secrecy. This is why mystery religions were considered perfectly compatible with mainstream religion (most of the time). Priests were expected to reserve a lot of information. This is actually still true in Buddhism, certain teachings are forbidden for the uninitiated in some schools.

That freedom evidently has its benefits and its downside, which is to say that we’re dealing here with something like what Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject.” Modern cognition — the way of knowing that accelerated with the Axial Age — is like an empire or climate change: we grapple only with the tip of the iceberg in either case because the whole of the thing is too vast and complex to be comprehended.

The benefits of meta-questioning included revolutions in spirituality, from the Jewish prophets to the Upanishads, and the seeds of scientific objectivity that would flower over a millennium later with the Industrial Revolution and the more recent, spectacular advances in high technology.

Again, I think you’re putting a lot of weight onto a theory which is contrived. And nothing about Old Testament Judaism was particularly analytical, in fact it was arguably actually *less* analytical than prior Pagan views of religion. Certainly, it is profoundly less analytical than the Upanishads. The only real “Axial Age” religion is Buddhism, and Buddhism is by its nature an esoteric religion not dissimilar to the mystery cults and priestly cliques which likely predated the Axial Age, and by necessity a popular and proselytizing religion. The difference lies in the Anxiety over “saving souls”, not in a special degree of introspection found in one but not the other. This is really the defining characteristic of “Axial Age” religions, and does not represent the evolution of civilizational ideas but the memetic power of exoteric proselytizing religions.

The Western practice of attempting to prove God’s existence stems from the philosophy of religion that infiltrated Hindu, Christian, and Islamic theologies. That philosophy began when thinkers ridiculed the dogmas of folk religion but realized, as the political philosopher Leo Strauss said, that they had better help rehabilitate the societies their cogitations threatened to subvert; otherwise, they’d risk undermining their lifestyle of intellectual elitism. The spirits and monsters of archaic folklore were replaced, therefore, with the God of the philosophers, with an abstract, metaphysical Absolute that could satisfy reason, if not an authentic spiritual impulse.

The philosophers did not ridicule the dogmas of folk religion, at worst they were reformers who had negative opinions of certain popular myths. This is not unique to them. Pindar reforms certain myths in his works as well, and he’s not a philosopher or a thinker of any kind. Likewise, the religious elite was always aware of the difference between religio and superstitio and was well-versed in philosophy.

The God whose existence can be rationally proven by forlorn primates, though, is no God at all since reason is just our primary tool for exploiting environmental conditions by objecting them. For instance, if God is the First Mover, he would be subject to the laws of motion, which would be absurd since God is supposed to transcend the limits of the natural order that he created.

Reason is our primary tool for exploiting environmental conditions… A discovery we came to using our… Reason. Do you see that this is a circular argument? Also, when Aristotelians refer to God as “first mover” they are referring to cause, not to mechanistic movement. Even “cause” is kind of a problematic word because people associate “cause” with a temporal change. This should be more accurately described as “source” or “constructor”.

The naturalized God of the philosophers conflicts at every turn with the friendlier, more intuitive God of folk religion because the former was meant to serve as a smokescreen to distract from the latter’s annihilation at Reason’s hands. […] The God of folk religion, as defined by the literalistic, exoteric interpretation of the creeds and dramas of religious scriptures has to be read into that definition of philosophical “theism.”

What particular God of folk religion are you talking about? The Axial Age philosophers are generally not identifying any particular god with God, they are identifying the gods with subsets of the intellectual sphere. For example, Plato identifies Zeus with the Demiurge, not the Monad. The true God is also described within Paganism but is understandably a more distant idea. Also, most myths in Paganism are not generally described as being actual temporal events. Myths are poetic images of the real but supra-temporal cosmic order. This is why two myths existing for a single event, or two renditions of the same myth, were not considered to be a problematic contradiction so long as the differences did not promote an impious or incorrect view of what was happening. The video I linked on Egyptian religion discusses this, if I ‘member correctly.

You have to presuppose that this “God,” “Creator,” or “Ruler” is a particular person such as Yahweh, the Father of Jesus, or Allah. You have to presume that this deity controls the universe because God is wise and benevolent, merciful and just. You must read between the lines to find the reassurances that God is especially concerned with our corner of Creation and that he promised to care for us in the afterlife, to save or reward those who worship him and follow his commandments, and to punish sinners and nonbelievers.

All of that theological rigmarole is left out of the philosophy of religion, but few of us care about the crypto-atheistic abstraction of a mere First Cause or Absolute Ground of Being. If God is more like the Way from Daoism or the Force from Star Wars than like a divine person who speaks to us and intervenes in our affairs to fulfill his gracious plan, concern with God becomes a pragmatic attempt to develop techniques for living well. Western religions in that case would be as therapeutic as Eastern ones.

Eastern religions also recognize the ultimate reality as fundamentally perfect and maximal in the same way Western religions do, they just separate out the intellect as a “second cause” distinct from the “first cause”. This Intellect cares about the well-ordering of his creation in general, given that he is the force driving it. Also, do not confuse Daoism or Buddhism as a “self-help guide”. They are still concerned with essentially becoming godlike through understanding of nonduality.

If you’re going to make this entire argument about debunking Christian interests in proving God’s existence, then you’re arguing against no one. Christians already accept that certain elements of God’s character are entirely derived from revelation, and the “God of the Philosophers” is not what you think it is.

The Far Future Humanist