Have faith that reality is better than any belief

One of my first Church of the Churchless posts, "Just have faith," was written in November 2004. It's still one of my favorites. Re-reading it today, I was pleased that I still agree with just about everything in it. 

The reason: even though thirteen years ago I was more open to the hypothesis of God and life after death than I am now, the method of open-minded scientific faith that should be used to investigate all sorts of hypotheses -- both worldly and spiritual -- rings as true to me today as it did back then. 

My personal research into the nature of reality has led me to the conclusion favored by most other scientifically-minded people: there is no demonstrable evidence for the existence of a conscious being, power, or force we could call "God." 

So I have come to reject the God hypothesis, even though my previous belief that God exists was highly pleasing to me.

This is the power of faith. Real faith. Meaning, faith that whatever reality consists of, knowing this truth, even if it makes us uncomfortable, is preferable to embracing a false comforting belief.

Below is what I said in my "Just have faith" post. Note that in the last sentence I speak of "God" being another name for "ultimate reality." This is a rather unusual use of the word, God, but it makes sense to me.

I still pray to God, even though I'm an atheist. However, when I say "God, show me your true nature," I'm really saying "Reality, I want to know you as you are." 

Just have faith

Faith is wonderful.
Faith is all we need to be spiritual.
Just faith. Faith alone.
So we shouldn't have faith in anything other than pure, naked, empty faith.

What is faith stripped of thought, emotion, perception, expectation, imagination? Whatever it is, that's what we are seeking. Such is the message at the mystical core of every deep spiritual teaching. A few examples:

Christianity: "Be silent therefore, and do not chatter about God, for by chattering about him, you tell lies and commit a sin....Also you should not wish to understand anything about God, for God is beyond all understanding....If you understand anything about him, then he is not in it, and by understanding something of him, you fall into ignorance." Meister Eckhart (Selected Writings, Penguin Books)

Judaism/Kabbalah: "God is not what we think It is. God is not a thing, a being, a noun....Jewish mystics often refer to It as Ein Sof, which means Endlessness....Ein Sof precedes thought and it even precedes the Nothingness out of which thought is born. Nothingness is viewed as a level of awareness that is the result of the 'annhilation of thought.'" Rabbi David Cooper (God is a Verb, Riverhead Books)

Islam/Sufism: "Anything that has a beginning and an end is a 'shell.'...There is more to the pronouncement of faith than what is said with the tongue because it too has a beginning and an end....We know then that the 'soul' of prayer is not only its external form but also a state of total absorption and unconsciousness during which all these external forms, for which there is no room, remain outside." Rumi (Discourses of Rumi, Threshold Books)

Buddhism: "If you want to reach the other shore of existence, give up what is before, behind, and in between. Set your mind free, and go beyond birth and death....I have conquered myself and live in purity. I know all. I have left everything behind, and live in freedom. Having taught myself, to whom shall I point as teacher?" Teachings of the Buddha (The Dhammapada, Nilgiri Press)

Here's how to tell the difference between true faith and false faith: Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a bare windowless room. Two doors lead out of the room. Both are closed, but can be opened with a turn of the doorknob. The doors are marked with signs that describe what awaits on the other side: (A) Reality, (B) Belief

After you open a door, you have to walk through it. The door then will shut and you never will be able to leave the place you have entered. Choose Reality and you will know things as they really are, from top to bottom of the cosmos. You will know whether or not God exists and, if so, the nature of this ultimate divinity. You will know whether death is the final end of your existence or if it is the beginning of another form of life. You will know whether there is a meaning to the universe beyond what human beings ascribe to it.

Or, choose Belief and you will know only what lies within the confines of your current suppositions about the nature of the cosmos. For the rest of your life you will be confident that what you believe to be true, really is. Any evidence to the contrary will not make an impact on your mind. You will remain doubt-free, faithful to the beliefs you now hold about God, creation, life, death, and the purpose of human existence.

Which door would you choose to walk through?

Before answering, consider carefully the potential ramifications of your choice. Reality is an unknown, a mystery. It could be frightening or fabulous, painful or pleasurable, warmly loving or coldly uncaring. Do you want to embrace absolutely real reality? Or would you rather hold on to your beliefs about what is real?

Someone with the type of faith extolled by the Church of the Churchless would unhesitatingly choose Door A and boldly stride into Reality. For their faith is not in anything particular, but is a faith that truth can be known, should be known, and, indeed, must be known.

This is the faith Henry David Thoreau speaks of in Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living it so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the Devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.'" (Where I Lived, and What I Lived For chapter)

Such is a scientific faith, a faith that does not foreclose in advance any possibility about what reality may consist of, a faith not in the unproven pronouncements of some supposedly holy person or book but in one's own direct experience of divinity--or direct non-experience, as the case may be.

Still, there is nothing wrong with belief, so long as our beliefs remain subservient to reality. When reality extends its hand, we should be able to happily surrender even our most cherished beliefs. This will not be difficult if our faith is in the rightness of whatever spiritual experiment we have chosen to undertake, and not in the surety of realizing a particular outcome.

A material scientist adjusts his beliefs, or hypotheses, in accordance with the results of his experiments. He does not design an experiment to produce certain desired findings, for this would not be science. The scientific method is what a scientist has firm faith in; everything else is provisional until proven.

Similarly, the height of spirituality is to just have faith.
Faith that reality is better than any and all beliefs.
Faith that the ultimate reality we may call "God" will be reflected in an open mind...but not a closed one.

 

Comments

[777]

""" Two doors lead out of the room. Both are closed, """

Then a Beautiful One came in and told you How to be beautiful, . . . too
and you forgot all about those doors
enjoying the flabbergasting sweetness of ever increasing Love ( Sound )

With lot's of Love for all of You

777

[al]

One of the greatest motivators of an advanced and experienced mind is the constant poke of "not knowing the answers to the big questions". Most humans will not explore these questions due to the pressures of physical survival and/or lack of interest. Point is, the mundane everyday mind simply cannot get concrete answers on its own without some help from an external source - hence, the Teacher/Guru/Master. Everyone has a teacher, beginning with one's parents, to help form the necessary understanding and preparation to move the young man/woman into life as an adult. Mentors abound in all education, apprenticeships and avocations. We simply must have an instructor to provide inspiration and illuminate the way to achieve any goal that is "beyond one's current abilities". When an individual moves to metaphysical or esoteric inquiries the same principle applies...a Teacher is absolutely necessary. It is said that the internal path is fraught with dangers, predatory currents and entities desiring to usurp one's attention and love. "Straight and narrow is the way and few be there that find it." Thus, one must be very careful in adapting any Guide.

[Spencer Tepper]

To go through either door you need the faith in your own legs to get there, in your own arms to open it. You must have faith that for the next few minutes existence will continue. Faith runs the universe and is behind all reality. But it is generally blind faith. We take reality for granted.

[Spencer Tepper]

"Such is a scientific faith, a faith that does not foreclose in advance any possibility about what reality may consist of... "

This is incorrect. Every scientific experiment consists of hypothesis testing. In actual science hypotheses are constructed painstakingly, laboriously, under highly controlled, repeatable and stable conditions to confirm the hypothesis only. Strictly speaking the experiment confirms with statistical reliability, that the predicted event occurred due to the controlled independent variable and not chance. Or, the conclusion is only that the evidence does not rule out chance and other random variables as the cause of the measured change. Mostly because the change is not large enough to say it is any different from random variation.

That's it. That's hypothesis testing. And it can only be done setting up the exact conditions dictated by the theory, under conditions controlled to eliminate as much as possible the potential effect of other variables.

This is what science is at its core. The creation of theories and alternative answers are entirely based on thinking, using known facts combined with unknown guesses to create a theory and from that theory a testable hypothesis.

No scientist constructs an experiment without doing everything the theory requires. Failing to actually implement the steps required by the theory would be an internal validity flaw. They got no results because they didn't tightly control the conditions required by the experiment.

And in a scientific community their experience and data would be subject to withering and exhaustive critique, to determine the precise flaw in their testing.

But here Atheists do not subject themselves to anything like that evaluation and criticism. They hold to their notions out of pure ignorance as readily as a devout worshiper of superstition. These are both religious practices of blind faith.

The first layer of scientific evaluation is the detailed audit of quality of the actual experiment. Only when the rigor of the experiment has been established by other independent members of that scientific community, amid more than one independent effort to duplicate the results, and repeatedly no results, can the theory then be questioned.

In science a theory cannot easily be disproven.

And that is really the nature of hypothesis testing. A hypothesis can't even be disproven. It can only be abandoned for lack of evidence.

When it is abandoned, it is because the documented results are in fact generated repeatedly through entirely different causal factors. Or else they are not generated at all by anything after several rigorous attempts, which meet the requirements of the theory.

When those same results can be generated from other factors, then the original hypothesis, and the theory it stems from, can be abandoned.

Nothing like that has happened with respect to any effort described here as the basis for Atheism. That rigor does not exist here.