Contemporary

Changing World Views

June 30, 2021

Before heading into Changing World Views, let’s review how Wikipedia defines a World View. It is “the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and ethics.” Or, in a more modest manner, “the framework of ideas and beliefs through which an individual interprets the world and interacts with it.”

World Views and Society

World views have serious implications for a society’s understanding of reality; a world view influences what one recognizes or fails to notice in the world, how one views the “other”and gives rise to social and political ideologies for dealing with what or whom is considered “the other.” Linguist George Lakoff, whose work on “frames,” largely in the context of politics, argues that language, both its terms and structures are “framed” in a specific context identified with a specific world view. It is from within the frames that meaning and argumentation are created and function.

The idea that world views cannot be separated from the language used to talk about the world is somewhat discomforting. Language does not so much express a truth about something already known, rather it creates the unknown so that the known may be discovered. Thus, the claim is often made that language creates reality. Not only does language provide a basic grammar and structure for the categorization and expression of experience, but provides the structures of popularly perceived “givens” such as time, space, and causation.

Differences of opinion about causation, for example, are reflected philosophically in the questions regarding free will or determinism. Differences of opinion resulting in the descriptive and functional ways people express natural phenomena exist, not because reality is there staring us in the face, but because they are mental constructs from a vast reservoir of impressions. These constructs go beyond descriptions of the natural world. They are also inclusive of “values,” including methodologies, within the construct integrating social and political categories.

World Views: Religious Perspectives

World views also involve religious perspectives and the creative power of religious language. The result is similar to any other world view in providing a framework of beliefs for interpreting the world and providing basic values for interacting with it. Specific religions provide the specific structures of ideas of time, such as a beginning and end, eternal cycles, or timelessness, and corresponding spacial and causal relations that transcend naturalistic explanations. More mythically based religious world views may be to a great extent dependent on non-rational responses to data and interpretations than to rational considerations or scientific descriptions of the world.

Such a religious world view is supported by a basic commitment to values present in sacred stories, parables, and other literary genre; whether from a different perspective they are considered true or false, real or fictional. The values, being inseparable from the literary and linguistic forms containing them, are to be “believed” as a unity, and are often considered certain or infallible, thus unchangeable units of reality. Furthermore, a kind of logical theory is possible (theology), by working from a presupposition of logical consistency. This logical theory can work within either a confined system (religious tradition and sacred text), or an open system involving all that is known by other systems of knowledge.

Linguistic Barriers to Shared World Views

Because language is so integral to collective understanding within a world view, one language may be difficult to translate into another. This makes creative and corrective comparisons among world views challenging. This situation does not necessarily mean that there is “world view and linguistic relativity,” and that no mutual understanding can take place among groups with different views and languages. Even in very different languages and world perceptions, some degree of calibration is possible. Nevertheless, a world view determines the kinds of questions asked about the world and the kinds of answers expected in return.

World views can and do change. In the case of interacting societies, cultures, and world views expressed linguistically, both language and the understanding of the world are modified by constant interchange. Thus, some degree of “world view fragmentation” occurs across cultural contacts involving the collision of different systems of knowledge which contribute to formation of new world views and modifications in knowledge systems. This process is not a smooth or easy one. For example, over time we have witnessed how social and political ideologies have produced different views of the world. The concept of “manifest destiny” was responsible for creating the American landscape in terms of “property” and classifying the indigenous peoples as subhuman “savages” with few or no rights to land or deserving of human rights. More recently, we encounter creative concepts like ecology and conservation, versus natural resource exploitation and utilization.

World View: Values and Morality

Like the power of manifest destiny, political and economic ideologies cannot be separated from these other perspectives. Nor can religious beliefs impacting the value of conservation of natural resources for the present and the future be exempted from beliefs about the end of the world. Viewing resistance movements as “terrorist” or “freedom fighters” is another conspicuous example of how value systems and language mold views of reality, thus world views. We may not have experienced a “War of the Worlds,” but we are constantly involved in wars of “world views;” and the fact that we are involved in an ideological and verbal war rather than a peaceful transition is testimony to the power of values and morality that are endemic in every world view.

Want to know more? Read the Paper

Joe Greig, Ph.D.

Ph.D. (New College, Edinburgh University), Professor Emeritus Andrews University, Berrien Springs, MI

Joe Greig / Contemporary /

Religion of the Future: Art and Metaphor

June 15, 2021

Religion of the Future: Reclaiming the Subjective Pole by Art and Metaphor.

Organized religion is declining in the western world. Not only is the decline due to the failure of past theological and philosophical systems, but also to the successes of science in competing with religious traditions in describing the world. A religion of the future must come to terms with the place of science in describing the universe. This includes the philosophic assumptions about reality as well as how we understand humanity in the universe…

Living in the world is more important than knowledge. Religion as an art form contributes to the expression of such values. Characterizing such values as artistic or metaphoric expressions, avoids confliction with scientific theories and discoveries. Science progresses by building on past discoveries and is judged by that progress. The greatest artistic expressions, including religious, may have been composed in the distant past. The difference lies in specific understandings of human life and the wider universe. There is a different modus operandi. Humans live richly by metaphors, not heartless and value neutral scientific theories.

What About Science Vs Religion

Both science and religion are responsible for creating confliction between them, religion by denying the legitimacy of a naturalistic non-contradictory scientific approach to the world which tolerates no contradictions or false facts; and science by separating the material world from mind, or subjectivity, which results in depreciating what gives the emotional richness to human life, including spirituality.

Interpretations of quantum physics changed the deterministic nature of the micro world and allowed for freedom and creativity, humanly expressed as the operation of free-will. Restoring mind to the material universe by mutual measuring among subatomic particles changes the traditional idea of material. In addition, the cognitive sciences have argued for the metaphoric nature of all language including scientific language. Thus, a window has been opened to view how metaphors in both the arts and science operate in the real world.

Science tended to view the universe metaphorically as a machine, and following, humanity as a part of the universe also as mechanical. Religion retained a belief in an “other” or transcendent aspect of the world, commonly expressed in the Judeo-Christian faith with regard to human kind, as being “in the image of God,” or the universalizing metaphor of “Incarnation.” Metaphors, in themselves, are neither true nor false; rather their strength is in what they evoke.

Religion of the Future: Metaphors

Although the approach to scientifically associated metaphors differs from that of religion which is artistic, the ingredients were in place to allow for a new understanding of religion, one which is artistic and metaphoric in nature. Humans were co-creators in a creative universe, which increasingly becomes more “wonder-filled” and mysterious with scientific discovery. With the critical demonstration that mind is never eradicated by objectivity, scientific objectivity was nudged, largely through quantum physics, to readmit mind to the universe it investigated.

In science, the universe as machine metaphor is hard to shake off. If we promote this metaphor, the work of science relative to humanity will be algorithms and robotics. The future is up for grabs. Religious or spiritual metaphors play into artistic expressions of what it means to be human, to love, and be creative in art and morality, and to create religions. But science viewing the brain, as it does the universe, from the outside, depreciates mind, consciousness, and a sense of the spiritual, as an attribute of an imperfect machine, the brain.

As a machine, human beings are believed capable of improvement by computerization and robotics. Thus the future of human beings does not lie in flesh and blood bodies that relate to each other as artistic bodies, but in algorithms of extreme machines that can reproduce themselves. This view is basically genocidal. It is sometimes called the Technological Singularity, reflecting on the Big Bang as the place where everything begins. Computers and robotics replace humans as the creators of art and values.

Man as Co-Creator

The metaphor of man being created in the image of God gifts man as a “co-creator,” thus man co- creates the image of God inclusively; patriarchy is overcome not only by including women, but the whole of what human beings may create and understand themselves to be in a universal environment, including the values of justice, mercy, and grace, not only to each other, but the entire living world.

The Future of Religion

A religion of the future must concentrate on what matters most to human beings; anything constituting a claim on reality beyond the emotional power that defines these human values must be put aside as of lesser importance. Doctrines that nit-pic particular interpretations of scripture, or that coerce individuals to believe a fixed way, external to the things that matter most to human beings, must be allowed to fade away. Likewise, glorifying science and technology, while valuable, does not qualify for the things that matter most to human beings. Rocket technology is not what human beings value most.

No religion can be considered superior to any other as a starting point; creativity demands a universal matrix in which to grow. Every religion will have to examine its metaphors in a context of diversity of cultures and societies to understand how they differ, and how they may coexist creatively and inclusively. But objectivity is not the primary means of this evaluation; this is an artistic and collaborative effort grounded in the mystery of what it means to be human, and what matters most for human life. In a sense we may refer to Kauffman’s understanding of Kantian Wholes: “the parts exist by and for the good of the whole, and the whole exists by and for the good of the parts.”

Read the Paper

Joe Greig, Ph.D.

Ph.D. (New College, Edinburgh University), Professor Emeritus Andrews University, Berrien Springs, MI

Joe Greig / Contemporary /

Religion as an Art Form: An Overview

May 15, 2021

Why Religion as an Art Form?

From the rise of science, its relationship with religion has been one of tension. The application of the Copernican Principle (world and the human must continually be removed from the center), progressively elevated the objective and scientific mentality over the religious as the measure of reality.

More broadly, historically, all critical methodologies confronting religious expressions have demeaned them as being false both factually, and causally. In time, the entailments and operational processes of the universe being understood as governed by laws, deterministic, and existing apart from the universe, and outside of human existence, thought, and action, not only stripped away theological concepts of inspiration and revelation, but jettisoned the idea of freedom both in the universe and human action.

Religion as an Art Form

The universe became a machine; humans were deprived of consciousness, free-will, self-identity, and the values associated with emotive expressions. With respect to reality these were illusory. In a sense humans were dehumanized. Quantum physics claimed reality was dependent on measurements made by a conscious observer, and the uncertainty principle offered a degree of freedom in the world; but the element of conscious observation altering the world was considered, to some, suspect.

Religion as an Art Form: Cognitive Science

Presently, largely due to the rise of the cognitive sciences, non-Cartesian linguistics, and a few theoretical scientists, laws are considered to be embodied expressions, their existence inseparable from their environments, and themselves responsible to a kind of prior causation, even acausation. The cognitive sciences have demonstrated that rational thinking is dependent on metaphors gained by experience and that scientific rationality cannot employ logic and mathematics to make claims beyond what is empirically accessible.

The presuppositions of science began to gravitate to earth and the function of the human brain and mind became central to understanding. Cognitive neuroscience, particularly in the form of neurotheology began investigating brain functions involving religious data and influence. The discipline is in its infancy, but seeks to integrate body, and mind, which has several referents, including soul, and seeks to understand the brain’s propensity for religious/spiritual content by scientific means. Since it claims it is not beholden to either science or God, it appears to be epistemologically novel and independent. Because God is the appositive to science, it would seem that the reference to God would be better understood as referencing revelation rather than the successes or failures of attempts to prove God’s existence. How successful the research will be in defining human identity is still a work in process.

Read the Paper

Joe Greig, Ph.D.

Ph.D. (New College, Edinburgh University), Professor Emeritus Andrews University, Berrien Springs, MI

Contributor / Contemporary /

It’s All Mr. Newton’s Fault

December 15, 2020

Hit on the head by Newton’s Law. The other day I was cleaning and reorganizing a small storage area. Small enough that I kept banging my head into objects that were even harder than my head.

Feeling Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation

This project involved moving heavy objects from one place to another and stacking things on top of other things. If I dropped something or knocked something over it would come (go?) crashing down onto the floor. And, I confess, that, in spite of being a vegetarian, there were a few times that I muttered non-vegetarian swear words.

Well, a day or two later I realized those frustrating things that happened were Mr. Isaac Newton’s fault. They were all because of his laws. His laws are why boxes are heavy, why they fall down towards your toes if you drop them, and why my bald head was bruised because two solid objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time.

So, I got to thinking about what would happen if we could turn his laws off just for the situations when they work against us. Say I want to lift a heavy box up off the floor to put it on top of another box. Just turn off the law that makes it heavy so instead of dropping it, I would easily get it where I wanted it. But, of course, I would need to turn Newton’s Law off very carefully and selectively.

Using the Newton’s Law Switch

If he was all the way off even for a few seconds the world would come apart. Very quickly. So, it would be necessary to turn him off just for the box. Certainly not for me because I want to keep my feet planted solidly on the floor. Now, if the box was temporarily not subject to gravity it should be easy to lift. It would work like this: (1) need to lift heavy box; (2) turn off the gravity switch for the box; (3) put it up on top of the other box; (4) turn gravity switch back on so box stays put when I let go of it.

Sounds easy. Then I realized that if gravity temporarily did not apply to the box, maybe instead of it being heavy it would try to fly up away from the floor and I would find myself hanging on to it trying to hold it down. That means that instead of needing an on/off switch for gravity I would need a dial allowing me to adjust the level that gravity would apply so I could dial it back part way until I had the box where it was going to stay put.

Obviously this idea is getting too complicated. Looks like I’d better not mess with the laws of physics, just stand aside and let them do their thing. Nor does it make any sense to think about which ones I like and which ones I don’t like. They all work together to provide a consistent and predictable environment that allows us to go about our everyday lives knowing what to expect.

So what’s my point?

Well, it’s like this. I keep up-to-date with the material posted on the Adventist Alumni web site where you found this. Thus, I read Wonderly’s paper (see similar paper) on the ice core, the the one with all the graphs—graphs that I studied carefully. They made sense to me. Then, I heard recently that a top level church administrator actually looked at some sections of the Greenland ice core at the place near Denver where they are kept. And of course, he heard the little presentation that was part of the arranged tour. He saw the layers. Then he walked away saying, “I don’t believe it.”

What that means is that he doesn’t believe Isaac Newton’s laws and a few other laws of physics that explain the seasons and the weather patterns. These behavior patterns of Mother Earth are what made the ice cores with their annual layers. Maybe he is high enough up there that he can ignore Mr. Newton’s law. Not me. When I ignore him, I drop things on my toes and that hurts.

By Ben Franklin [a pseudonym]

Anonymous

Unknown Author
Submitted by A-A

Contributor / Adventism, Contemporary /

Adventist Alumni: Thoughts on Who We Are

November 15, 2020

Adventist Alumni are all types of Seventh Day Adventist. I’m writing about this web site… and using A-A thoughts as an abbreviation for both Adventist-Alumni.com and Adventist alumnus.

Reading about who we are before continuing here might give more insight into these comments because they build upon what’s said there. What is this web site about? Yes, there’s the Mission Statement and the Not Mission but they need to be enlarged upon because it is important that the people who come here have the right understanding of where it is that they have come.

Some of you have been A-A for many years and you know where you are and you’re happy and content there. That is good. I hope you enjoy this virtual gathering place where freedom of thought and expression are highly valued. We seek and will value your input and your experience.

We Welcome You

This little essay is aimed more at those of you who are not sure you belong here; not sure you want to be here. The door is open so come on in. We promise, we will not close the door behind you. Stay for a while and observe people who have set their thoughts free to explore other possible ways of looking at the world.

Who are Adventist Alumni: Don't Panic

The nice thing about A-A’s virtual world is that you can stay where you are and be here too. Like being two places at once.

Let me use the symbol T-A to designate “Traditional Adventist.” Now traditional is not bad. It’s a place where people are. I was once there myself. In fact, almost by definition, every A-A was at one time a T-A.

T-A is a respectable place to be. If you’re questioning the T-A position, or easing away from it, you are already, and perhaps unwittingly, headed in the A-A direction. Note that “unwittingly” is not “bad.” I was unwittingly becoming A-A long before I heard of the term A-A.
There are lots of people who are “other religion” alumni. They are welcome here too. If you are one of those you will discover you have much in common with A-A’s. The only problem is that you may not understand Adventist inside jokes—and we may not be able to explain them to you. Feel free to tell us “other religion” inside jokes…

Who are Adventist Alumni: Breathe

The people here are friendly.

In fact, that’s about the only requirement for being here. The big points I want to make and emphasize here are these:

A-A is not here to convince you to leave T-A and become A-A.
A-A is here to help you make the transition from T-A to A-A, if you are contemplating doing so. If you already made the transition, A-A is offering you a new friendly place to be.
If you don’t know yet that you are really A-A instead of T-A that’s fine too. Maybe you need help to figure out why it’s difficult to seek out non T-A ideas.
You don’t have to “leave” the SDA church to become A-A. A-A is an “intellectual odyssey thing”. No, that does not mean that A-As are smarter than T-A’s. Be aware that lots of people are both SDA and A-A.
You don’t have to believe any certain thing to be A-A, although it probably helps to believe in intellectual freedom.
A-A is a big tent place. Both by plan and also because A-A’ers taken as a group hold a very wide spectrum of beliefs.

That’s enough big points.

Is it really hard to let go of those traditional ways of thinking?

Young Folks Wanted

Being old (whatever that means) is not a requirement for becoming A-A. One of the sad facts about the SDA church is that many bright young people, some of whom are highly educated, are leaving because they need a big tent and the church is not providing it for them.

We welcome young people into our big A-A tent. We look forward to the ideas they will submit.

Submitted by Ann Alumnus – A pseudonym

Anonymous

Unknown Author
Submitted by A-A