Is God real according to Ken Wilber?

I enjoyed getting an email from Сергей Бадаев. Which I gather is Sergey Badaev in Cyrillic. The "from" line caught my attention, though I have to admit that at first I suspected spam.

Not at all.

Sergey had an essay to share, along with some other links:

Dear Brian,

I have read your article on "Integral World" (Integral Egos Gone Wild  http://www.integralworld.net/hines2.html) and I thought you may like to read my article the topic of which has some connection with the topic of your article.
It is "Is God Real According to Ken Wilber?" (http://www.integralworld.net/badaev2.html)
I will appreciate your remarks and comments.

Here are two more my articles on "Integral World" if you get interested:
Individual and Social in the Integral Theory of Ken Wilber (http://www.integralworld.net/badaev1.html)
AQAL's Weak Points (http://www.integralworld.net/badaev3.html)

Best regards,
Sergey Badaev

I liked his "Is God Real..." piece a lot. Well written. Nicely argued. I always enjoy cogent critiques of Ken Wilber's approach. This one strikes at the heart of Wilber's view of reality. 

Which Wilber shares with many other believers in supernatural phenomena. Here's some excerpts from Badaev's essay. Hope this stimulates you to read the whole thing.

Here is a key problem in Wilber's arguments, as he does not take into account two different meaning of the word 'real'.

On the one hand, we can call 'real' everything which is a part of our actual experience. For example, if I feel pain, this pain is real as a part of my experience. If I feel hungry, my hunger is real as well. Any fiction is real if it is a part of my experience.

On the other hand, we can call 'real' only the correct interpretation of our sensual experience when there is a corresponding fragment of so-called physical reality.

For example, an apple on the table is real because I can come, take it and eat it. But an 'apple' that I can see on the screen of my monitor is not real. I cannot take and eat it. This is just a virtual image which is created by numerous colourful dots on the screen.

...So, for any organism like us, there is a critical task to distinguish in our inner experience the images and perceptions which are the results of signals from the outer world and the images and perceptions which come from the sense organs or from the brain itself.

...If to be real means to be a part of my inner experience, it is real even if it is not confirmed by other people. For example, if I try some food and feel bitter, this bitterness is real for me even if other people report that this food is sweet.

On the other hand, if some people take a huge dose of alcohol and see some small green crocodiles, their collective confirmation will not be a reliable criterion that those crocodiles are part of physical reality.

Comments

[cc]

...If to be real means to be a part of my inner experience, it is real even if it is not confirmed by other people. For example, if I try some food and feel bitter, this bitterness is real for me even if other people report that this food is sweet.

Different people can respond very differently to the same experience, and their differing responses are subjectively real. But there's no accounting for taste, whereas there is accounting for whether God exists outside of the believer's mind.

It can't be proven that a work of art or craft is "good" - all one can do is find its flaws - and even then, its flaws can be seen as its virtues. Such is the nature of taste. So if belief in God is a matter of taste, the flaw is that there exists no evidence to support the belief, and only an irrational mind can find virtue in that.

[John]

http://beyondblessed.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/god-is-real.jpg

[cc]

http://beyondblessed.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/god-is-real.jpg

Cute. It rhymes. You can chant it to yourself and recite it to others. Repeat it often enough and, like magic, it becomes true. You see how idiotic religion is?