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In my circles on twitter, the Mystical Christianity conversation is cropping up again. It tends to come around every few months, at least for the past year I've been on the site.
Tyler Alterman writes a long post on it that is mostly summed up here:
Now to broaden this outside of just Christianity, I'm curious what the Motte thinks of symbolism as a whole? I will admit my own path back to religion came via a symbolic pathway, although I believe it goes far deeper than this.
That being said, from my short time here it seems like most of the Christians on this site aren't that into symbolism, and tend to be more "rationalist" and materialist in their worldview. Again, might have a mistaken impression.
I know this is a rationalist offshoot forum so not sure I expect a ton of mystical/symbolic discussion, but I'm kind of surprised by how little there is given how many professed religious folks there are here. And I do think from a Culture War angle, that materialism is definitely losing steam (especially amongst the right) as we see more and more cracks form in the edifice of Expert Scientific Opinion(tm).
On a deeper note, the symbolic worldview is all about seeing the world through the language of God (or meaning if you prefer), in a way that helps people bind together and understand events in the same way. Right now we are in "darkness" symbolically because, well, nobody can interpret events the same way! I personally think a return to the symbolic is inevitable given how confused everything is at the moment, although the transition may not be smooth or easy.
Huh? I've never seen anyone (on the right or elsewhere) go from "the institutions are politically compromised" to "there is nonphysical stuff."
As for discussion about symbolic beliefs: The famous quote "all models are wrong; some are useful" is actually redundant. It just needs to be "some models are useful." Useful means wrong, because if a model was right, you wouldn't give up and call it merely useful.
Anyways, symbolic beliefs are false. The Christians here are actually Christian, so why would they engage with symbolic (false) beliefs?
Allow me to provide.
It is trivial to demonstrate the existence of "non-physical stuff" from within a strictly materialist framework. With an understanding of the political compromise of institutions, and an awareness of the historical record of those institutions, it is fairly trivial to peel the consensus materialist framework like a banana.
Man. I feel like you're hitting a giant blindspot here.
Maybe you're right in saying that, with the appropriate definitional games, one can peel materialism like a banana. But isn't there merit to the framework which is hardest to peel?
The Christian framework comes apart at the slightest interaction with evidential standards. This has lead countless mystics and gurus to spin off their own heresies which try and rehabilitate it. Gold tablets, ESP, Arianism, whatever. None of them do any better than "consensus materialism."
Or maybe I'm misreading you entirely and tilting at windmills. Sorry.
Not Materialism, the consensus materialist framework, the one that claims that there is no need to appeal to non-material explanations, and therefore any apparent evidence for non-materialist phenomena or explanations should be discarded without examination.
Briefly:
the consensus Materialist framework claims that Materialism adequately explains all observed phenomena, and that therefore there is no room for non-materialist explanations for observed phenomena.
We do not actually have a Materialist explanation for where the universe comes from; the chain of causality terminates roughly at the big bang. Okay, it's sort of a problem for "we can explain everything with Materialism" to then admit "other than the cause of the universe's existence", but that's a very long time ago and of questionable relevance to most practical questions. It's not entirely unreasonable to handwave that one.
Only, we do not actually have a Materialist explanation for the evident phenomenon of Free Will. We have a lot of evidence that either Free Will or something doing a completely seamless imitation of it exists: firstly, every one of us has an entire lifetime's experience of making an extremely large number of choices quite freely; secondly, every piece of functional social technology we have operates on the assumption that free will exists, thirdly, every attempt to develop social technology that operates off Determinist principles (and there have been many) has utterly failed: neither mind reading nor mind control appear to exist.
Materialists insist that all evidence of the existence of Free Will must be discarded, because it contradicts our Materialist axioms. But if evidence of Free Will contradicts materialist axioms, that necessarily means that it is evidence against materialism. And if one examines that evidence rather than simply discarding it axiomatically, it turns out that it is actually an enormous, heaping pile of evidence against materialism.
You are familiar with "The God of the Gaps", wherein theists made predictions about the material world based on their belief in God, and then had those predictions falsified by the march of Science, only to retreat back into smaller and smaller gaps where science had not yet penetrated, eventually retreating to claims that are completely unfalsifiable.
If you examine the history of Determinism, the exact same sequence recapitulates itself: Determinists make bold claims, and then those claims are tested to the tune of trillions of dollars and millions of man-years with the full backing of two civilizations, and the result was that their claims were completely falsified. The Determinists retreated to new, somewhat more humble claims in the gaps of the existing science, but science continues to advance and those claims are likewise falsified. This process has proceeded in this way to the present, and Determinists now make no testable predictions at all, but claim that Determinism must be accepted axiomatically, with no apparent awareness that they are adhering to Determinism of the Gaps and that this might be a problem.
"Materialist explanations are sufficient to explain all observed phenomena, except the ones we don't want to examine because otherwise they would be phenomena Materialism can't explain" doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but is pretty much the state of the debate near as I can tell.
Materialism as an axiom still works as well as it ever did. It is not falsified so long as it limits its claims to being a very good solution to a very wide range of problems, not a fully general solution to all problems. But the latter is the consensus framing, and it is essentially a very large and lovingly-detailed sandcastle.
[LATE EDIT] - none of the above adds up to a claim that Christianity is correct, or even that Materialism is not an excellent axiom to reason from. Determinism very well could be correct, it's as reasonable an explanation for human consciousness as any. The point is that explanations that rely on things we can't observe or test are not Materialist explanations, and that while this fact should be so obvious as to go unsaid, a whole lot of people who call themselves Materialists do not appear to understand it.
Someone here once mentioned that Christianity was ridiculous. I asked them what they thought of the Simulation Hypothesis. They said that was different, because it was a materialistic explanation. and this is in fact how most descriptions of the Simulation Hypothesis are quite explicitly framed. There's this assumption that starting from a materialist frame, we think simulations are possible, and therefore nested simulations are possible, and therefore many layers of nested simulation are possible, and therefore we have a much greater probability of being somewhere in the simulation stack than at the baseline, but somehow that Materialist assumptions still obtain. But this is not how Materialism works. Once you are positing that there is an unobservable reality underneath the observable one, all bets are off. There is no basis for Strictly Materialist inference about the nature of baseline reality from observing the contents of a sim.
Nondeterministic free will is not nearly so clearly evident to me as it appears to be to you.
For those three lines of evidence you list, I can think of at least one other phenomenon which I'd say fits all of them pretty well, especially if you give me a couple hundred years' worth of leeway on technological development and scientific inquiry, and yet is unambiguously false.
For another, we have good reasons to think that decisionmaking and behavior are at the very least strongly dependent on the material actions of the brain, in that we can go screwing with neurons on chemical, electromagnetic, or mechanical levels and notice that it results in changes in those things.
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