... Prayer: A Neurological Inquiry.
Actually, there's a lot of interesting stuff here, but the final sentence is a howler: "In contrast to thoughts themselves, the brain activity from which thoughts arise does consist of energy—electrochemical energy within neural circuitry. Reading this teeming energy in millions of circuit neurons and translating it into the thought or prayer arising from it seems theoretically impossible for even a supernatural being. "
A supernatural being, by definition, is, well, supernatural, which would mean, by definition, that natural criteria would not apply to such.
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ReplyDeleteThough the concept of supernatural is also perhaps by definition an innate absurdity since if something exists, then it must be natural, since if we take natural to be what lies within the real, then the supernatural being real cannot contravene what is real. So if the "supernatural" is indeed real, the error lies in a faulty, limited notion of reality as having to conform to erroneously formulated laws. The idea of reality contravening its own being, course is, of course, ridiculous. To put it another way, ignorance of Reality leads to an ignorant version of reality. The division of life into natural & supernatural is in essence a schizophrenic divided notion of life arising from a schizophrenic divided notion of life
ReplyDeleteMethinks, Andrew, you have committed a petitio. Haas does not advance the propositon that the supernatural is an innate absurdity. If you want to believe that the natural world is all there is, go right ahead. Proving it is all there is, however,is something else again. And you don't prove it by assuming it to be so. Moreover, in your formulation, you are defining the "supernatural" as a subset of the natural, which is precisely what, by definition, it is not - which was my point.
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying, Frank, that the existence of the supernatural is an absurdity at all. I'm actually taking the existence of the supernatural as a given starting point as opposed to arguing whether it exists or not. And from here, once the supernatural exists, then it is not "supernatural" at all, as the segmenting of life into "natural" and "supernatural" is a false division. If we accept the existence of miraculous events, then the implication should not be that the natural order has been contravened by these events, but that our notion of the natural is in error and must be expanded. Clairvoyance here, for example, is not a contravention of the natural world; it is just that the concept of a natural world of set rules which is contravened by such phenomena is in error. The categories of natural & supernatural are not subsets of each other as they are one, and the creation of these catergories is a divided sense of life, and how can life or reality be divided.
ReplyDeleteI misunderstood. And I think I would tend to agree. Though I also think there are realms of being that are beyond the categories of thought. Have you read Krishnamurti?
ReplyDeleteI've read and been extremely impressed by Krishnamurti, Frank. The directness and doctrine free "way" of his(quotes on way as Krishnamurti obviously not a believer in a way to truth or oneself; being oneself, why one need a way to oneself?). One other thought that struck me is Jesus' line about how can Satan's kingdom stand if Satan's kingdom be divided. Contrarily God's kingdom being reality cannot be divided against itself. One illustration of our iggnorance of the real nature of the natural world would ne going back a couple of hundred years and claiming to be able to see events in another part of the world by magical means...one would think of a witch or wizard with a cauldron or some such. Now however we know by experience that life and the universe do have invisible threads that if tapped into do enable the transference of slices of the visual field from one place to another- television. WHat would have been described as supernatural becomes an enlarging of the natural, not that too many people seem to notice these implications, or if they do, the mistake tends to be made that the existence of something within the natural explains it away; the notion being that if God is real, then God's kingdom should be divided against itself.
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