RCSaunders wrote: ↑Wed Mar 30, 2022 9:39 pmSo, why do you think the universe is contingent on something else, or was created, or could ever not have been? Do you have evidence for it, or is your belief based on something else? (Of course you don't have to answer. I'm just seriously curious and willing to give you an opportunity to explain your position if you'd like to.)
Well, the real reason is entirely and absolutely personal, intuitive, and does not depend on or have a relationship to rationalized, structured presentation of evidence of the sort you demand.
I do not say that the universe is contingent on something else, yet I understand I think why you phrase it like that. I intuit that being, existence, all that exists or could exist, arises out of supreme being. In my way of thinking, which is as I say something arrived at either by intuition or by having received it, and is less a thought per se and more something revealed, there can be nothing else but 'supreme being'. You could use a range of metaphors -- light, intelligence, being, though I tend to gravitate to some of the Vedic terms that I use from time to time.
In a host of different ways, the way that I look at things transcends any of the specific religious doctrines where *origin* and *beginning* are dealt on. I regard origin stories as fables and myths insofar as they all seem to be elaborated pictures of something that, I just do not think, can be represented. I do not think I have an illusions or delusions about this type of knowledge. That is, I recognize that it is not communicable. Except through allusion. So at the end of the day, and I did of course mention this long ago to IC, my position is
gnostic (but that does not mean Gnostic).
What is mostly of interest in what you assert from my perspective --
and assert you do! -- is your sense of absolute certainty that what you are saying is true and right. I am always
on the lookout, as it were, for declarative stances.
My belief, therefore,
is based on something else. But I cannot present it as 'evidence' obviously. For evidence of-a-sort I tend to place credence in rather standard theology -- Christian theology where what you reference is explained as well as it can be explained. I do not believe that a 'proof' exists because a proof, if it did exist, would convince beyond all doubt, and those who are not convinced by the verbal proofs remain unconvinced.
I fully admit that a great deal of people's belief is rather wonky -- shaky is perhaps the word -- and also willed. I think many 'choose to believe' and for a group of reasons. And yet there are believers who, by virtue of accumulated inner experience, testify that they have proofs. But they are
always subjective.
I will also admit that the entire enterprise of *belief* and
believing in God is in a very confused and unsettled state. One need look no further than the American social landscape where the madness shows itself. And for this reason the nihilism that arises when 'the horizon is erased' is particularly dangerous. That is why I define desperation as a real motive and motivator. Those without sufficient anchor, those whose world has been turned upside-down and have no reference-point, exhibit this desperation in grabbing hold of a life-preserver. In my own case I do not so much require a 'life-preserver' to keep myself from drowning, though like all people I am not immune to the larger, impinging crisis, but more that I seek through strategic measures to bolster what I define as *the conceptual pathway to keep open to the possibility of God's existence*.
Intellectually, the best treatise for those with an inclination to such topics, I'd suggest Richard Weaver's
Ideas Have Consequences. But his book and other essays of his did not *convince* me nor did they 'bring me to a religious perspective'. His writing helped me to see the reasonableness of the stance he alludes to. And it came very much after the fact.
Essentially what I try to do is to *mine* in literature, in poetry, is discursive essays, in art certainly, what I see as the evidence of the
consequence of having a *conceptual pathway* that I describe --
but to what? Belief in God, link to God, spiritual practice -- for what purpose?
We don't even have a concept for such things. The only such things we know are things like numbers...which would seem to be uncaused, but have never caused anything.
