Here are some more musings from my notebook, on Christianity and philosophy, Free will and God’s foreknowledge, Coming down from the peak psychedelic experience, and Prelife and afterlife.
Christianity and philosophy
Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your strength, and all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. You can’t love God with all your mind while believing that trying to be a good philosopher is incompatible with being a Christian.
Philosophy the handmaiden of theology
Someone I read recently—was it Galen Strawson?—said that philosophy is not the handmaiden of anything, denying the traditional metaphor of philosophy as the handmaiden of theology. Well, I think philosophy is the handmaiden of theology. Having tried to quit that job, she has gone astray in naturalism, physicalism, scientism, producing monstrosities such as Nietzsche’s esteem for the “will to power”, Parfit’s reductionist view of personal identity (Hume’s bundle theory); Dennett’s “explanation” of consciousness; Singer’s arguments for infanticide; the neo-paganism of worship of “the planet” (It might be instructive to ask oneself what makes this planet “the” planet.); and tortured attempts to deny the immorality of abortion. (Since this thought touches on political controversies, I’m afraid some readers will stop reading right here, since, for many, politics has replaced theology. But I hope not.)
Free will not compatible with God’s foreknowledge
It is possible for God to create only things that have no will of their own, so that He could have foreknowledge of everything, and it is possible for Him to create some creatures that do have a will of their own, who can either do His will or not. But it isn’t possible for Him to do the latter and for Him to have foreknowledge of what they will do. If God infallibly knows I’m going to do X, then I can’t choose to do Y instead. And it doesn’t help to say that God knows that I’m going to decide to do X, so that it is still my decision. That is because a decision is a choice between two or more equally possible alternatives, and if God already knows what is going to happen, there are no alternatives.
You may ask, “Who are you to say that there is something that is impossible for God to do?” But it is more about what it is possible for me to believe. If God can know what I will freely choose to do before I have decided, then either I don’t understand what it means to freely choose to do something or I don’t understand what it means for God to know something.
Some will respond, “That’s right. You don’t understand what it means to freely choose to do something. You think it’s possible, but it isn’t.”
But the only arguments for determinism that I know about confuse explanations in terms of a cause and effect relation with explanations in terms of a person’s reasons for doing something. If a person’s reasons for making a certain decision are irrelevant, because the fact that the person thinks of those reasons is determined by causes outside that person’s control, then the determinist’s reasons for deciding determinism is true are irrelevant. If the question of free will vs determinism, or any other topic, is something that can be reasoned about, then being convinced of one answer and being convinced by the opposite one are both compatible with the very same chain of causes leading up to the moment of becoming convinced, and the conviction can only be explained in terms of the different reasons for believing one answer or the other.
Someone else may respond: “That’s right. You don’t understand what it means for God to know something, and you shouldn’t even try. His knowledge is so far beyond our knowledge that we shouldn’t try to understand what it is like.”
But that gives me no reason to believe that it is possible for God to have foreknowledge of what I will freely choose to do, because if I don’t understand something, it is insincere to claim that I believe it.
I believe that we can and do have the ability to make free choices about at least some things, and that this is the way God wants it to be. My reason is that the thesis that we can’t make any free choices implies that we are all wrong in the way we talk, think, and act almost all the time. It would require a very compelling argument to become convinced of that, but if it is true, then becoming convinced would have nothing to do with any argument, good, bad, or indifferent.
Do we come down from a peak psychedelic experience, and if so, why?
Art Kleps wrote that the lesson of a peak psychedelic experience is always the same, that life is a dream, but that it is immediately repressed in a thousand different ways. Did he think it wasn’t repressed in his case? Or, that there are degrees of repression, so that in some cases, as in his, the truth is closer to the surface, though it is still repressed? By the way, it is no more meaningful to say that all is a dream than it is to say that all is real.
As I understand Freud’s theory of repression, repression occurs when the ego, having become conscious of something it fears as a threat to its existence, somehow manages to render itself unconscious of it, at the price of a distorted and unrealistic view of the world at the conscious level. The goal of psychotherapy is to bring this repressed material to consciousness again so that the ego is confronted once more with what it fears as a threat and can come to see that is isn’t a threat after all and can correct the distorted perception of the world at the conscious level that was caused by consigning the threat to the unconscious.
Then, if the revelation of the peak psychedelic experience is always immediately repressed in a thousand different ways, so that afterwards the tripper’s view of reality is distorted, what is the point of having it? The answer could be that even a repressed revelation is better than no revelation, and that the resulting distorted view of reality is less distorted than what came before the trip. Or, the answer could be that all that matters is the peak experience itself, and that all the non-peak times are irrelevant.
But how helpful is the Freudian conception anyway when it comes to understanding how to integrate a peak psychedelic experience into one’s life? Suggestion: Admit that one can’t really stand to remain in ecstasy, but affirm that one remembers it as the standard of excellence—which is like admitting that one is not God. This is how having had the experience helps one to be in the right relationship with God. It helps one to know God and oneself better.
“I don’t need anything but the Bible to know God.”
To those many who say, “I don’t need anything but the Bible to know God”:
The Bible itself tells you that Jesus said that He would send a Comforter. I think that the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, can take many forms. Who are you to say He cannot come to someone in the forms of a peak psychedelic experience? I’m not saying that anyone needs to take a drug in order to know God. I’m saying that it makes sense to me to think of some peak psychedelic experiences I have had as a glimpse of the Kingdom of God, where everything is fundamentally all right.
Prelife and afterlife
In response to my confession that I think it is reasonable for me to believe in an afterlife because I can’t imagine my own non-existence, Roger Cook posted a comment on a Facebook link to myiapc.com as follows: “Since you weren’t conscious before you were born, why is it so hard to imagine that kind of oblivion happens to you again upon your death?”
My answer: It’s not at all hard to imagine that the same kind of “oblivion” that preceded birth will follow death, that is, an “oblivion” that turns into a new life.