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IntellectualSpirit
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Name: Daniel
Country: United States
Metro: Raleigh
Gender: Male
Interests: photography, running, deep writing, graphic design, motion graphics, I also enjoy keeping my hand on the pulse of the film industry, as far as it interests my designer's perspective.
Expertise: Graphic Design. Grew up as an illustrator, but I hardly ever straight up draw anything now because of how meticulous I am. Design equals communication. The faster it can be done the better.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Media
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AIM:  blueyedspeedster
Member Since:
7/1/2003
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| STAR TREK AS SUCCESSFUL MYTHBack when I was young and watched Star Trek: The Next Generation with my father and brother in the evenings, I often thought to myself when the title appeared, "So, when is the next generation?" It had not occurred to me that there was was a previous incarnation of the show. As it was, I certainly would not want to imagine the bridge without the commanding tone and smooth cranium of Captain Picard. Earl Grey, hot. One could easily imagine the same character on the deck of a Victorian Age warship, cultured down to the timing of his blinks.
Recently I turned on the passively-imbibed message transmitter, or TV as some know it, out of mild curiosity for what might appear randomly at the click of a button. It was the Sci Fi channel, so fondly recalled for the subtle play made during the mid-break segments on the word "if" hiding in the middle of the abreviation. The channel also is home of the most recent incarnation of Star Trek, and this time, I was watching what was simultaneously the first and last generation. The show, simply titled Enterprise, explores the first steps of the human race into warped space-time. The writing and production values have changed very little since the Next Generation set the pace with its remarkable 10 (I believe) season run. Watching three episodes back-to-back, the common principles of the approach of the show stood out among the specifics of the individual episodes, and I was again able to appreciate the brilliance of the Star Trek universe. Not for its androids or weaponry, its hot alien women or even its utopian vision of Earth's future. The single most brilliant design of the Star Trek myth is that the Vast Universe is utilized as a metaphor for exploring both the Individual Mind and the Global Mind. Both universal issues of the individual and his internal conflicts, and contemporary social issues, are handled with imagination, makeup, and limited special effects. I recall primarily one episode that broached the issue of sexual orientation and the repercussions of the "correction" of a natural variation. Some alien was attracted to Commander Riker, but this was a symptom of some condition, with a parallel to homosexuality. I also recall that this episode did not seem to comment on the rightness/wrongness of the methods used to "correct" the alien, but the effects of a larger culture's drive towards a particular vision of uniformity, the basis of which is brought into question through this very scenario of severed interpersonal connection.
I suppose I recalled all of this to relay the epiphany that has stayed with me for more than a week now. It is this:
What it is to be human, continues to be defined. Or, more accurately, expanded.
Through my research into the nature of perception and ontology, a little piece which I may post here in the near future, I discovered that the Search for Unity and its Beauty, which continues to inspire human endeavors of both science and religion, contains one inevitability and irrationality: all is one. Particles and particulars alike are partitioning conventions of the mind, or inevitable side-effects of the operational procedures of the brain. Everything is really something else, but the brain is structured to obtain only a limited set of data points from the curvaceous fabric of reality, causing us to think in terms of our natural constraints, as opposed to the forms which defy the tiny points of words and ideas. Some scientific observation, however, rather clearly defines our current problem of thought.
We know that matter and energy are interchangeable forms, and that matter can be thought of as condensed energy, which can under special circumstances be exploited by us in the name of energy or victory. Energy, or radiation, can itself be thought of as particular, in the form of the photon, though several curious experiments reveal that light also has wave characteristics. The photon, it would seem, is, like the atom, reducible to something else still. I have a hypothesis that energy can be thought of as condensed, or crinkled, space-time. This meaning, among other things, that all is one, and the wave characteristics underlying all things in this expanded singularity provide for the geometrical basis for the infinite (and unfortunately, irrational) universe. The passage of time, and all other perceptions really, can be thought of as the cognitive measurement of a particular value derived from the local underlying geometrical reality, or wave-form universe. Secretively, and most curiously, both the past and the future are coexistent, for these particulars are simply values derived from a single geometric reality. Time, in a sense, is eternal. As Einstein once said, "The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, however a persistent one." The illusion, of course, is mind. Anything that can be named or categorized is an idea, or construction of the brain, even the self. Ask yourself what lips are forming the words of the voice in your head, and you realize, that voice is nothing yet something, nowhere yet everywhere. And that, in turn, is the nature of the universe, which you are: beyond categories, beyond the finite.
But there is another side to this scenario. Your body, which supports your brain, which produces the mind, is constantly exchanging its molecules with the environment, while the mind itself constantly exchanges old information for new from the environment. And so what it is to be human is constantly changing, or to use another language of knowledge, our cognitive processes are encountering new values of the wave-form universe, as both it, and we, expand and mature. Thus the Star Trek myth recognizes and capitalizes upon the metaphor of the Sentient Universe, and as we boldly go where no man has gone before, we venture only more deeply into ourselves. We will encounter alien forms, to be sure, but they will strangely seem familiar (emphasized visually by humanoid form). The aliens of the Star Trek universe, of course, are consciously designed to represent human values and ideas, as they encounter and dialogue with each other. This universe, however, is not as concretely anthropocentric as our myths are in narrative. Chances are very slim that we will constantly be bumping into aliens who look like us with the exception of a few extraneous cranial protrusions. And no one really gets to see angels, demons, or the Big Man Himself. Historical time and space are not their home and they don't really look anything like how they're envisioned for mass consumption. The first aliens we meet will probably be microbes, not Vulcans; the first spiritual beings we meet aren't angels, they're fortuitous junctures of events falling under the purview of a coldly probabilistic universe. To some institutions this detail may be a grave threat to their personal God, but the disparate thinking between science and religion is a veil, an illusion, however a persistent one.
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| WEST OF GOD: AN OPEN CRITIQUE PART 6
THE WHAT AND WHY OF ISRAEL'S GOD
While there is an open debate as to which elements of the Biblical
narrative of the history of Israel are historical fact and which if any
are historical fiction, it is possible to construct a plausible
historical scenario consistent with the Biblical narrative in which the
invention of the particular patron deity of the Israelites would become
likely.
It has already been established through historical precedent that
pre-scientific age peoples in general prefer the apparent elegance of
the explanatory power of anthropomorphic forces in the form of
metaphysical intelligent agency to other possible explanations in
spheres of foreign knowledge [20]. It is also established that, whether
the Israelites originated from Mesopotamia or Egypt, or spent some time
in both places, they were preceded by and grew among theistic cultures
which often employed gods as explanatory-justificatory devices to
validate the structures of society (i.e. kings were ordained by or
fathered by gods, or became gods themselves). At a critical point in
the development of a burgeoning population of a significantly distinct
culture, it becomes necessary to develop further that independence, but
also to develop unity within that culture, with the aid of physical
separation and the development of a new identity as a self-governed
society. The growing tribes of Israel, after having developed
connections with either Egypt or nations of Palestine for some years,
on account of such vicissitudes of fate like droughts which encourage
collaboration, may have perceived an opportune time to sever
connections, escape non-advantageous subservience to larger societies,
and seize a land and national identity of their own. But the
Israelites, without the advantage of having conceived of natural
inalienable rights, or laws of nature and man, or a rational theory of
ethics, predictably chose a patron deity, and perhaps a formative
event, to pull the common people together into a cohesive new nation. A
developing nation in such circumstances would have no great difficulty
in finding a trustworthy god who would take charge and be the absolute
source of validation for ethics and national direction, because men
could always "discover" one if they could not decide on a favorite
ancestral deity. The upper echelons in the Israelite community appear
to have chosen an ancestral deity, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, to lead them to a new national identity. And a developing nation
in such circumstances would have no great difficulty in finding
formative events. The Israelites appear to have often engaged in
warfare to establish and maintain their territory, and nothing brings a
nation together like war for the sake of survival and identity.
While in some instances it is openly admitted that the Israelites stole
conventions from surrounding nations, such as with human kings and
their harems; and in some instances these admissions go without saying,
such as with prophets and seers; and in other instances an admission
would be potentially embarrassing, such as with the structure of the
desert Tabernacle following the pattern of a standard Egyptian temple;
and still in other instances an admission is particularly damaging,
such as when the Israelites were forced to accept the institution of
slavery because their law legalized it; it is yet never admitted that
the patron deity, which was made known through these other conventions,
was itself quite conspicuously designed for such a time and place as
when the ancient Israelites desired such a standard solution to
entering the world of nations. Yet on what grounds can this special
pleading be made, that Yahweh was the sole exception to the universal
rule that deities are man-made on demand when people are in a strategic
cognitive need of them, and in spite of the predictable aforementioned
evidences that this deity was indeed a product of its time? A typical
defense consists of positively framing what was supposedly unique about
the Israelite scripture and culture, as if to imply that, to the extent
that Israel was anomalous in a good way, it must have been
supernaturally discontinuous with its times. Everything from Israel's
monotheism, to its lack of religious iconography, to its use of written
law, to particular prohibitions and proscriptions in that law, and to
its emphasis on physical cleanliness in its rituals have all been fair
game in supporting the supposed supremacy of Israelite culture, from
which one is supposed to further infer a supernatural source. But it is
worth noting that this last inference is never warranted, firstly
because, to the extent that history allows an adequate glimpse into the
ancient cultures of Mesopotamia and the surrounding regions, it does
not so easily allow for the theory of an anomalous Israel [The Egyptian
pharaoh Ankhenaten circa 1300 BCE instituted monotheism on a national
scale, and Hammurabi made use of written law.]; secondly, because even
if some aspect of Israelite culture remains anomalous in terms of a
naturalistic theory of a strictly direct cultural descent of ideas,
that aspect is not anomalous in context of a humanity naturally capable
of generating like ideas; and thirdly, because the relative supremacy
of Israelite culture to other cultures of the time was too shallow and
base to be seriously attributed to the advice of an omniscient or
omnibenevolent being [While emphasizing cleanliness to a degree, God's
law recklessly failed to mention germ theory and the importance of the
sterile procedure, even for the safety of the number of children
undergoing the surgical procedure of circumcision. In tandem, even
modern theists are aware of the sub-par ethics of God's law, and will
openly admit of the moral repugnance of the ownership of persons as
permanent and inheritable property, much more the singling-out of
people of other ethnic groups to fulfill the demeaning role (Leviticus
25).]
An alternative approach to establishing the validity of the special
pleading for the factual existence of the Israelite deity is to argue
from instances of corroboration from archaeological evidence that,
since the contents of the scriptures are not entirely inaccurate, one
is free to infer that any kind of content that has not or cannot be
disproven has some favorable probability of being true. If a writer
knew his factual geography and the logistics of ancient warfare, he
probably knew his factual theology as well, and to deny this connection
is to risk being lambasted for revealing his own irrational
anti-supernaturalistic bias. Yet it is not difficult to recognize the
imprudent excess of credit-giving here, as the Christians themselves
may be quick to revoke their confidence in ancient historians whenever
the supernatural elements reflect the beliefs of Pagan cultures.
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| CAN GOD CREATE A ROCK SO HEAVY THAT HE CANNOT LIFT IT?
Revisiting Christian Apologetics through the blogworks of Xanga. My voice is italicized. Original post from GoodGreyPoet.
Traditionally, Christians have described God as being:
1) All Powerful (Omnipotent)
2) All Knowing (Omniscient)
3) Perfectly Good (Omnibenevolent)
4) Infinite & Eternal (without beginning or end)
It should also be noted that there is herein an assumed fifth essential
attribute of the divine: that God is constrained to human logic in his
every endeavor. This assumption will become apparent shortly.
These are the primary characteristics of God. I say "primary" because
if we were to take any of these away he would cease to be God. Atheists
[excepting those who are interested in debate as opposed to personal amusement]
love to ask the question: Can God create a rock so heavy he cannot lift
it? This is because they are convinced that the theist who tries to
answer it puts themself [should theists be likewise stereotyped for indulging in poor grammar?]
in a lose/lose situation. If they answer yes then God is not
omnipotent, for he cannot lift the rock. If they answer no then God is
still not omnipotent because he cannot create the rock to begin with.
And if God loses his omnipotence, he ceases to be God! At first glance,
answering this question does appear to be a lose/lose situation for us
as theists to answer.
But a closer examination of the question reveals that answering the
question is not the problem at all. It is the question itself that is
the problem. The question commits what logicians refer to as the
"Fallacy of Contradictory Premises." According to the laws of logic,
whenever two premises directly contradict each other, those terms
cannot be applied to the same object or event.
Much deeper lies the problem of explaining why the infinite must be
logical, or why the creator of the universe in which laws of logic
apply must himself be contained by those laws of his creation.
Other examples of these types of questions are:
Can God bake a cake so big he cannot eat it?
Can God create a star so bright he cannot look at it?
Can God draw a square circle?
Can God create a married bachelor?
Perhaps lacking in their own creative
faculties, the problem-solving Christians fail to conceive of a God
omnipotent enough to create a universe in which different laws apply
and in which square circles would be of a more feasible nature.
Like the rock question, all of these questions essentially boil down to asking the same thing: Can God do what God cannot do?
The real problem is the implication
that there is something God cannot do, by some limitation of his frame
or the universe in which he exists. Which, coincidentally, and quite
ironically, is the embedded heart of this Christian defense: that God
cannot do, what is by perspective of the laws of this universe, the
illogical.
Take for example, the last question: Can God create a married bachelor?
In this example you have two premises that contradict each other:
"married" and "bachelor," because a bachelor, by definition is an
unmarried male. Therefore these two words cannot logically be applied
to the same individual.
Unless, of course, God creates a
universe in which there is more than one traversable dimension of time,
in which case some circumstances would allow some sense to the term
"married bachelor." Or, if this man could, by truly miraculous powers,
inhabit the skulls of two separate bodies, then even in this universe
such a thing as a married bachelor could be spoken of with some sense.
For if God were to create a bachelor that was married, he would no
longer be a bachelor. Similarly, the question: Can God create a rock so
heavy he cannot lift it, commits the same logical fallacy. It is a
meaningless question...a logical absurdity. As theists we have no
reason to be intimidated by what Mr. Spock would call an "illogical
question".
Ah, but the theist fighting atheists
off in the name of Logic ought to be very intimidated by scripture,
which proposes a God so powerful that it can create beings to thwart
its own will and disturb the perfection of its own creation, and a God
so good and powerful that it would create souls it would not or cannot
save from hell (Matthew 11:21-23).
With this defense presented, the
theist merely alters the form of the question atheists among others are
curious to ask: Can God do that which is illogical? Or is Logic the
fundamental constant of the universe in which God exists?
| | |
| BY REQUEST: ON DETECTING THE *REAL* GOD
Miracles, in historical time and space, demonstrate that the
fundamental order of the universe is, by intention, oriented towards
achieving certain goals in the development human civilization by the
dissemination of certain ideas. Certainly this would be unquestionably
the case, if traveling proselytizers were impervious to poison and
harm, or if they were instantaneously transported across the vast
deserted regions of Asia, or if Biblical documents were destroyed only
to be found floating down again from heaven. But as I have already
written elsewhere, if the God of heaven and earth were ever so
Christian and efficient as only the supreme deity would be, then he
would have long ago forsook the constraints of human dissemination in
favor of inscribing directly onto the hearts and minds of men from the
womb.
The God of heaven and earth may wear a mask in the form of
Judeo-Christian theology, but that theology is not the whole and
precise truth which men know. Truth and meaning are far more expansive
than one book bound, and the God of heaven and earth is far more
horrid, loving, and sublime than what the Middle East could have ever
conceived. To detect the real God, who is not bound by books or cultures or
the parameters of intelligence, you go out into the wilderness. And you
listen. Because millions of years of evolution have inscribed into your
subconscious the full wisdom of the ages from which every scripture of
every place feeds. And that is why isolation gives way to liberation,
as spoken of so often in the metaphors of scripture.
“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who
looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.” – Carl Jung
| | |
| WEST OF GOD: AN OPEN CRITIQUE PART 5
THE HOW OF GOD: INTELLIGENT AGENCY IN THE COGNITIVE PROGRAMMING OF PERCEPTION
How "God" is, is contingent upon how the human mind works, that it
should find intelligent agency so easily grasped and inferred, even to
the absurd degrees of silly superstitions and dangerous paranoia.
Within the past few centuries of written history alone, the conviction
of the imagination has given rise to compelling forms of intelligent
agency, waxing and waning curiosities such as astrology, witches, Mary
in mundane objects, phantom windshield pitters, el chupacabra, big
foot, and genitalia thieves, to name a few
[http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-05/delusions.html]. Some of these
psychological phenomena have had not only the powers of explosive
dissemination, but great staying power as well. How the mind perceives
faces in the Moon and clouds, and how it projects intelligent agency
into the physical and conceptual worlds, giving birth to Mother Earth,
Father Time, and Lady Liberty, is central to understanding how the mind
can also project intelligent agency beyond the universe in which
intelligent agency exists.
It is a detail of more than passing interest for psychologists that,
when people are given scenarios requiring the use of logical deduction
with abstract notations, the solution is not easily forthcoming for
even those of our modernity and educational sophistication, but the
solution is easier to come by when the scenario is instead detailed and
grounded in familiar social situations [16]. If there is one
intellectual skill set humans develop universally regardless of
educational levels, it is the ability to model and predict from
intelligent agency. The golden rule, which has independently appeared
across the globe in many ages, and which has been suggested to be the
cornerstone ethic of civilization, assumes a grand efficiency in the
human ability to use the model of oneself and its desires to plan and
choose stable interactions and favorable relations with others. Simple
observations of children at play will reveal the instinctual
spontaneity of grouping (collaboration and alliances),
hierarchy-building (submissive and dominant role-taking), and
competition among humans, giving rise to the familiar notions of
cliques, bullies, and fights, without which no grade school experience
is complete. Perhaps the most fascinating phenomena of all, in terms of
the current discussion, is the human ability to model and respond to
nonexistent intelligent agents as if they indeed existed. In its most
innocuous form this ability is manifested in childhood relationships
with imaginary friends, leaving milk and cookies for Santa or incisors
for a fairy, and conscious role-playing in games such as "Simon Says."
With some subtlety it is found in the compelling nature of fictional
novels, films, and myths, which can evoke real emotional reactions and
teach real truths while the narratives themselves, if not also the
elements within, are factually nonexistent. More disturbingly it is
manifested in the charades of mediums such as the contemporary psychic
John Edward, who uses cold reading to produce generic models of persons
that coincide with his captive audience's models of their own dead
relatives. Unable to fathom what tactic would lead to such coincidences
of detail, the audience members default to inferring that Edward's
access to family information is best explained by a mysterious
connection to "the beyond" as Edward himself suggests. Without a modern
understanding of such harmless manipulation as merely entertainment and
parlor tricks, however, the populace at large would either hail Edwards
as a gifted prophet of God or burn him at the stake as a gifted servant
of Satan. In this respect at least, the human ability to compellingly
free-form model intelligent agents begins to take on a more religious
dimension, for "the beyond" is thought to be inhabited by more than
grandparents with a kind word for the living, but also agents who were
never born into the world of men—gods.
When people respond to their acquired models of ancestors as if the
intelligent agency of those ancestors continued to exist and offer
advice or other aid from beyond the grave [17], it is no cumbersome
leap of logic to the viability of ancestor worship, food and animal
sacrifices, and prayer to the ultimate ancestor, the "father of us
all," who could conceivably have all the power that legend has to
offer. Neither is there a clearly-inhibited step toward belief in the
existence of other intelligent agents in the beyond—agents who, having
never been born into flesh, preexisted even the first father, and so
may be conceived as having the power to create life and the power to
destroy it. That compellingly-modeled intelligent agency, existing
conceptually and independently of questions of factual existence, is
the natural impetus of the people's conviction in the words of the
prophets of religious deities, is a most satisfying conclusion for the
atheist, whose suspicion is roused by the inexplicable dependence of
almighty gods on human mouths to speak their own minds, manpower to
accomplish their own wills, human artists to make public appearances,
and myth and legend to exhibit any power outside of the human skull.
That religious deities wield great power in the human imagination, and
typically nowhere else, is just as obvious a conclusion for the
monotheist, who does not allow for the factual existence of any deity
in all of human history excepting his own. The Judeo-Christian god is
very much an integral part of the history of the divine imagination,
for the Judeo-Christian scriptures have been cunningly employed to
establish new movements such as Mormonism and the Jehovah's Witnesses,
by the same tradition of inspiration that Christianity employed the
scriptures of the Hebrews, who themselves employed elements of Egyptian
and Persian religious culture in their own scriptures. Where in history
exactly incorporeal intelligent agency was first conceived that the
notion should be eventually inherited by many modern religions is a
question that remains unanswered, but that this evolution of the divine
is directed by forces of human culture and the vicissitudes of
imagination seems well enough answered in the positive by inevitable
reason. For even if it should be said that the Judeo-Christian god
exists factually, it must also inhabit the imagination and be
independently modeled to some degree, in view of the variations of
belief and practice that have emerged within and from the popularly
accepted boundaries, in any given period of history, of what
constitutes Christianity.
Of course, to arrive at a god of the magnitude as that of the
Judeo-Christian one requires more than finding an invisible home for it
and persons capable of speaking for it; there must also be found its
activity in the physical realm to suggest its power, wisdom, and
authority. The mind has also provided the means to perceive intention
in the universe: the compelling cognitive powers of coincidence. [Here
I do not use coincidence in the sense of 'just' or 'merely' a
coincidence, as if to define intention out of the concept. Instead I
use coincidence in the sense of a conjunction of incidents, which may
or may not proceed from causes including intelligent agency. The word
coincidence has a natural ambiguity about it, which I favor in terms of
its ability to make visible potential post hoc and ad hoc fallacies.]
The perception of intention or of planning in the order of the universe
is a phenomena easily evoked from the brain, which normatively assumes
the coincidence of events—their temporal, spacial, or conceptual
proximity—to be relevant information concerning the source and nature
of causation. This natural inference system has both its benefits and
its drawbacks. For instance, the correlation between the movements of
the heavenly bodies and phenomena of Earth allows for the perception of
cause-and-effect relationships between heavenly and earthly phenomena,
some of which historically have been accurately conceived and many of
which have not. While some earthly phenomena are correctly explained in
the influence of the sun and the moon, such as seasons and ocean tides,
other earthly phenomena, such as human personality and individual or
collective destiny, are not in fact influenced by heavenly phenomena [I
should say, not influenced directly, though the energy of the sun is a
prerequisite of the biological processes that do account for
personality and destiny]. The ancient superstition of astrology was
thus born, not from an accurate understanding of the influence of a
handful of then-known planets, but from the human ability to coax
meaningful patterns out of unrelated phenomena, on the basis of the
assumption that they are related because of temporal/spacial proximity:
planetary positions' temporal proximity to births, and planetary
spacial proximity to constellations or other planets. Comets and
eclipses offer Earth nothing more than an unusual display of light, at
such times as the celestial mechanics allow, but these phenomena have
oft been interpreted as being related to earthly phenomena, by a common
cause if not by a direct cause-and-effect relationship. The coincidence
of a birth and a heavenly body appearing to hover over Bethlehem is
mentioned in some Christian gospels, presumably on the basis that such
coincidence is convincing of the child's significance, though this
conviction would have dissipated if the star appeared hovering over
China or if it hovered over Bethlehem ten years later. The power of the
narrative depends on the reader's acceptance of astrology, which itself
depends on the reader's acceptance of the relevance of temporal and
spacial proximity concerning causation. [While in modern Christianity
open acceptance of astrology is sparse, Christian Evangelical leaders
in America can be found dabbling in a more down-to-earth model of
speculation, one in which natural disasters are conceived as
representing the expressed will of God. While celestial motion and
solar eclipses are easily understood in terms of natural law, and are
now known to wield no effects beyond the psychological, the complex
factors behind the formation of hurricanes, famines, and diseases allow
for a level of ambiguity in the source of their causation, resulting in
a secret chamber of ignorance from which an angry Judeo-Christian god
springs on occasion.] While astrology is one of the more popular and
long-standing misapprehensions of correlations in causation, likely due
to the fact that its predictions are typically broad enough to ensure
some probability of accuracy, there are other examples of this kind of
misapprehension, such as belief in relevant correlations between skin
folds of the hand and future events (chiromancy), cranial topography
and character (phrenology), and hand-writing and personality
(graphology).
There is yet another, and perhaps more powerful, category of
coincidence that beguiles the mind, and that is the coincidence of
conceptual proximity. When exterior events or phenomena are aligned in
some fashion with interior concepts or psychological phenomena, the
mind may infer some relevance in this connection. Most fundamentally
this tendency is expressed in the unavoidable perception of a face in a
simple drawing involving two dots and a curved line. What is seen is
not, in fact, a face, but a drawing with some analogous proportions to
the human face; yet to ask of a person what he sees, he will invariably
say that it is a face. This same tendency is also expressed in the
perception of the Virgin Mary in window panes, tree stumps, and
grilled-cheese sandwiches, those curious and infrequent visions adored
by some Catholics. In some cases this tendency is useful for detecting
intelligent design, the activity of intelligent agents, since nature
observably has no common inclination to transcribe the proportions or
contours of the human body in any format. Nor does nature observably
have any inclination to behave as if ordered by intelligence, making it
possible to distinguish between living and nonliving objects. Yet
inevitably the hyperactive tendencies of perception may on occasion
serve as a hindrance to understanding; false positives are unintuitive,
so that their falsity, when real, becomes the unthinkable. Consider
this argument posed by the Christian Origen:
"As the stars move with so much order and method that under no
circumstances whatever do their course seem to be disturbed, is it not
the extreme of absurdity to suppose that so much order, so much
observance of discipline and method could be demanded from or fulfilled
by irrational beings?"
This is properly an argument from analogy to the intelligence of stars,
but Origen finds so intuitive his own ability to anthropomorphize the
heavenly bodies that their intelligence has become the only viable
option, and their lack of intelligence unthinkable to the highest
degree. He could not see the lines and paper for the face he had
perceived. By the strong human association of intelligence with certain
effects of this source of causation, the coincidence of external
phenomena behaving in a similar fashion as that which is powered or
influenced by intelligence is simply too compelling an evidence to the
mind, and so the illusion forces the conclusion that the phenomena is
in fact derived from intelligent agency. Today the absurdity of the
alternative has subsided, largely due to an epidemic change in model
perspective by the elucidation of celestial mechanics, but it was
inevitable that the theists would seek to capitalize upon this artifact
of perception, for no illusion could conceivably be more useful, and no
self-deception more desirable.
[future section regarding natural theologians such as William Paley]
The third category of coincidence, which is currently receiving a fair
amount of attention from Christian apologists, is an improbable and/or
unrepeatable juncture of events whose outcome is perceivably beneficial
towards life or happiness. Many mundane event probabilities are
intuitively gauged by the human mind and do not always require an
explanation in intelligent agency, but precipitously large
improbabilities of beneficial outcome may express a pattern easily
suggestive of planning or scheming which do require an intelligent
agent. Unlikely events happen all the time without typically being
recognized as such, but when they do occur, the uniqueness of the event
according to the individual perspective begs the question of "why,"
much as mundane events evoke the same question in young children who do
not yet know what is mundane. In these instances of improbable events,
the imagination is open to considering new and alternative
explanations, one of which may be causation by intelligent agency. A
series of fortuitous or unfortunate events suggests an arrangement
specifically in regards to one's well-being, which is typically the
interest of only other personal and thus intelligent beings. A modern
example of such thinking is a variant of the strong anthropic
principle, mastered by such apologists as Hugh Ross of Reasons To
Believe, wherein the parameters of the fundamental constants of the
physical universe are strongly perceived to be tweaked in favor of the
production of extremely unlikely and intelligent carbon-based life.
Through this perception of likelihoods is forced the conclusion of the
activity of an omnipotent agent, who may just as well be the
Judeo-Christian deity. The relative accuracy of like suspicions however
is contingent upon the sample size of probabilities, and subsequently
can be exaggerated by the special framing of circumstances. Those who
are familiar with the ways of salesmen are aware of the cognitive
influence of the special framing of circumstances to elicit a
particular choice by a potential customer. By the veil of calculated
ignorance the potential customer may fall into a false sense of
privilege, this creating positive energy in the perception that one is
not receiving the benefit of just a product but the benefit of a
remarkable once-in-a-lifetime deal. What the potential customer is
strategically unaware of, is that the "deal" is in fact a mundane
routine—everyone is getting a deal that is not a deal, since the price
was exorbitantly high to begin with. Those who argue for the remarkable
hospitality of this universe towards life as we know it, simply because
life is allowed to exist somewhere at some point in some condition,
often fail to mention that most of time and space, including this solar
system and the Earth—and even life itself—are almost if not entirely
inhospitable to life. The inclusion of this relevant information
potentially leads to the opposite perception that this universe is not
tailored specifically for intelligent carbon-based life in any way
noticeable, but is rather remarkably indifferent towards it.
Yet if one was a man living two millennia ago, from a time in which a
vastly inhospitable universe was not yet conceived, and the heavens
quite literally revolved around the one planet in the solar system that
supports life, natural ignorance would provide for mankind in its
infancy the perfect incubation chamber for a runaway anthropic bias—one
that would inevitably benefit theistic philosophy and religion.
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