https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1w7TQ1KqaBY
Okay, so I should definitely be doing all the other things I need to do, but this is way too much fun. On the video that I did recently on the symbolic versus literal interpretation of the Bible, I got a very good and concise comment about atheism and why many people have abandoned religion. I have some sympathy for atheism in many ways, mostly because many religious people have done a dreadful job at explaining things and have alienated generations of smart people. And also because atheists often become that way through curiosity and a desire to have an integrated worldview. I mean, when you face literalist religious types, there’s a kind of blind unconsciousness that is truly nauseating. I once confronted a literalist type and when I asked him, when it says in the Bible that Christ was taken up into heaven, where exactly did he go? Into the atmosphere? To the moon? And that person had actually never thought about that, had never asked themselves that question. So yeah, sympathy for atheists. So I’m going to read the comment, which is by a user named Amber Trance, and I’m going to try to answer as best as I can. I am an atheist because my pure and honest desire to understand the universe led me to answers from biology, physics, and other scientific fields. These answers are more sublime and precious than anything I know. I believe religions and symbolism can confer meaning in one’s personal subjective life because I’ve been on that path before. You could say that is enough because all we have in our existence is our subjective point of view, but I believe it’s a noble act to care less about that and to desire to know what happens in the universe outside your own personal life. Then how could anyone judge you for being an atheist when science, as imperfect as it is, brought you knowledge about distant stars and galaxies, the small world of atoms, and much more? Mysticism and religion did not enlighten us about matters above subjective and social aspects. Many other things can replace religion, mysticism and symbolism in creating a stable and moral society. The value that science brought to humanity on the other side is irreplaceable. I will cease being an atheist and become spiritual or whatever when all these pretty post hoc connections and symbols will make a difference in allowing me to understand the nature of the universe outside my insignificant, tiny life. Alright, that’s actually pretty good, and I hope I chose a comment that most atheists would find represents a typical journey which would lead one to atheism. And to be fair, that’s a pretty generous statement. Many atheists might be far more acid in their vision of the symbolic language. So there are a lot of things to untangle, but here we go. Symbolism and religious language is not just about the subjective and social, and symbolism is indeed a language describing what happens in the universe. So then why might you ask, is it so different from modern science? Well, the answer often given by atheists is that it’s just a less advanced system of what science is trying to deal with. We know more today, and so we can correct the mistake our ancestors made. So if we take for granted that religious language were there to describe the world in a technical sense, the same way modern science is attempting to do, then yes, modern science has a more, let’s say, accurate and exact description of natures, of natural laws and events. But I think to assume that is ill-informed, and maybe even a bit ill-intentioned. For if one compares apples to oranges and insists that they are the same, while constantly mocking the orange for being a queer, regressive, and inadequate apple, well, there’s something that’s wrong. So then how do we account for the difference between the two? Well, maybe something like this. Symbolism and religious language in general are an attempt to understand the universe, yes, but also while simultaneously understanding the process by which we understand the universe. Okay, so let me repeat that in another way. It’s both a description of the world and a description of how it is I can describe the world. So in relation to modern science, religious language would be something like a something of a meta process or a meta language because it tries to express the thing it is focusing on, let’s say a mountain, okay, while also expressing the process by which that focus is even possible. So if modern science can describe a mountain, height, width, terrain, its foliage, its mineral constitution, religious language is expressing why I have a category like mountain in the first place, why that category is relevant to humans, basically what does a mountain mean? So the scientists will retort something like something like a mountain doesn’t mean anything, but to say so is to ignore the human variable, ignore that we are the ones looking at the mountain, even if I believe that that mountain is outside of my tiny existence. It ignores consciousness, ignores why I would bother to have a category like mountain. It ignores that I have to climb a mountain or go around a mountain when it’s in my way. It ignores the effect going up a mountain has on human consciousness. All those things are real. They are no more illusions than the scientific data. Symbolism tries to take all of that into account, that is, discuss a mountain without pretending that we are not human beings living in a world of mountains. So it does have a personal and social aspect to it because it takes into account consciousness, but it isn’t just personal and social. And also taking consciousness into account doesn’t mean that it’s a relative thing and subjective in the way that we see that word today, subjective in the sense of idiosyncratic, arbitrary to my own particularities and proclivities. There’s a universal aspect to the experience of a mountain. So the religious language is above the scientific language and contains the scientific process within it, makes it possible. And I know that Jordan Peterson has mentioned this a few times, but he hasn’t had the opportunity yet to elaborate completely how that works in his talks. And I know it’s hard to understand and it will seem aggravating beyond belief to many atheists at the outset. So I’m going to try to give an example that will unpack this as much as possible. So I think we can keep going with the mountain. I’ve talked about mountains before in other talks, but it’s such a basic image that it can help us understand many things. There are reasons why mountains are often sacred. So the experience of a mountain is that as you ascend the mountain, the width of the base is refined. It necessarily gets narrower and narrower as you go higher and higher. The experience of particularity is contained more and more, because as you go up the mountain, you can see more and more, you can see further. So when you’re at the bottom of the mountain, you can only see the very particular, the rocks in front of you, the trees around you. But as you ascend, your gaze widens and you get more and more of an encompassing experience. This refinement of experience happens as the mountain itself becomes narrow and narrow, moves from the particular and the many to the one and the universal. So reaching the summit, then your view opens up completely in a kind of a jump, because suddenly as you reach the summit, in that very moment, the entire world seems to appear beneath you, and you can see the mountain itself on all its sides and the horizon all around you. So that experience of the mountain, the one I’ve just described, is the same as any hierarchy. So let’s take the army, for example. The men are at the bottom and get closer to the mountain. They get specific orders, specific tasks. But as you go up the military hierarchy, the corporals, the generals are less and less in terms of quantity. There are more men and less leaders. And then they also have a more global vision of strategy, and each level contains the explicit actions of the lower levels within them. So let’s say the men have to dig this trench, transport to this outpost. The higher levels contain that within the more implicit strategies. Let’s say reinforcing that front, defending these assets until one ascends, when reaches, let’s say, the top general, where the patterns of the battle are set up with a final goal in mind. Outflank the opponent. Take this city. Win the war. So similarly, the same hierarchy will have a conceptual equivalent. So for example, specific species of something, let’s say a Dalmatian, a Greyhound, or a Pekingese, despite their wide differences, can be contained in a higher concept, which is dog, which can be then contained and regulated by higher and higher concepts, canine, mammal, animal, and then being. So what the language of symbolism does is suggest that there is a structural relationship between all these different versions of the hierarchy, that they exhibit the same truth and so are connected in a manner which has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of quantitative analysis of science and everything to do with language and consciousness. So Christ is the head of the church, just like our physical head is the symbolic head of our body. That is certainly not a scientifically valid statement. So now we’re going to take it one step further. What happens is this. Symbolism. Religious symbolism is exactly that ladder. It’s exactly that mountain. It offers images at the base of the mountain, the most particular images possible. These act as a kind of support for the higher levels of meaning. So symbolism is always very concrete, very immediate, a tree, a rock, the earth, the heavens, but the structural patterns then move you up towards more universal and encompassing realities. Now most of all we need to understand that this mountain, this ascent, is also an ascent of consciousness because we human beings are organized in the same way. We have these desires and multiplicities on our edges. These competing personalities which pull us here and there tend to pull us apart, pull us into multiplicity. But as we ascend our own consciousness, we find a center, the head or the mind. The church fathers speak of the nous and that center of consciousness is capable of transcending and unifying the multiplicity into oneness. Now the symbolism of hierarchy I’ve just described, the mountain, the ladder, is also the root of why we identify the highest things with spirit, air, wind, or with intelligence. Why we identify the highest of high with heaven, that which is so high above us that it is unreachable. The Father, light, spoken word, which comes both from intelligence but most immediately from the head of the body. So it’s not that God is physically in heaven, no reasonable Christian believes that, but rather the analogy of our experience of heaven, of ascension, is the root, the support so to speak, for that which is beyond and cannot be described directly. So hopefully that’s clear enough, but I still haven’t shown you how that works. I want to go back and read the comment that I was sent and hopefully I can show you. So our commentator says, quote, I am an atheist because my pure and honest desire to understand the universe led me to answers from biology, physics, and other scientific fields. These answers are more sublime and precious than anything I know. Notice she says these answers are more sublime and precious. Now what is that word sublime? It’s an interesting word, because something sublime is something which is elevated. The source of the notion of sublimation was the change of a solid into a vapor. So is that what she means? That the scientific answers are literally like changing a solid into a vapor? Of course not. What she means is that scientific answers are more precious. She said it rarer, something like the move from the large quantity at the base of the mountain to the rarer and rarer and more sought after summit. What sublime means is that scientific answers are more like heaven, i.e. vapor, and less like earth, i.e. solid. Quote, I believe religions and symbolism can confirm meaning in one’s personal subjective life, because I’ve been on that path before. You could say that is enough because all we have in our existence is our subjective point of view, but I believe it’s a noble act to care less about that and to desire to know what happens with the universe outside your own personal life. Then how could anyone judge you for being an atheist when science, as imperfect as it is, brought you knowledge about distant stars and galaxies, the small world of atoms, and much more? Now, this is where we need to pay attention. That mysticism and religion did not enlighten us about matters above subjective and social aspects. Now notice again that she uses the word above. Now, does she mean that, for example, that if I had a stack of scientific data, like a pile of paper, let’s say, that I would place it on top of a stack of subjective and social matters? No, obviously not. What she’s saying is that there is a hierarchy of value, a mountain of meaning, and scientific knowledge is, in her opinion, closer to heaven, closer to the oneness of the summit. And that’s really interesting because the scientific method is by its own admission, by its own process, a removal of all hierarchies of value. It is the leveling of the world into measurable phenomena, the removal of all meaning. Yet in order to express the superiority of science, our commentator must resort to the same language, the same structure we use to say that God, the absolute, the one, the origin of all multiplicity is in heaven. So what is fascinating is that she can use that structure of heaven and hierarchy unconsciously, exactly because the scientific method does not include it in its worldview, does not take it into consideration how we exist and how we encounter the world. She said it herself, quote, it is a noble act to care less about our subjective point of view and to desire to know what happens in the universe outside your own personal life. So she is criticizing symbolic language while using the symbolic language to elevate, to magnify, and submit herself to science and its precious sublime answers. But the language of elevation, of hierarchy, being indeed the manner in which we describe, we ascribe value to things, is the religious hierarchy that we find in Dante or in Jacob’s Ladder or in Moses’s Ascent of the Mountain, the great chain of being as it has been called. It goes unnoticed even as it is being used creating a form of cognitive dissonance, an unconsciousness of language and of one’s own embodied human existence. You know, I used to think that atheists, that when atheists proclaimed their allegiance to the flying spaghetti monster that they were just joking, but now I’m starting to think that because they elevate the scientific process, that they elevate something which is itself a denial of any elevation, that maybe they do worship something at least akin to the spaghetti monster. Because they don’t understand that analogies of hierarchy are coherent, that we move from the specific to the specific and quantifiable, which is what science attempts to describe, you know, dig that trench, carry those guns to the origin of existence, the purpose, win that battle, win the war. The purpose which is also the capacity to even see, to even consider specific and quantifiable things. You move from the feet to the head, from the earth to the spirit, from the children to the father, from the darkness to the light. And all religious images are completely coherent as they place themselves on the hierarchy of being. But if one thinks that earth is more sublime, that quantity is more precious, that descriptions of facts are above their meanings, and the purpose of why we’re describing those facts and not others, well someone who is able to inhabit unconsciously such an upside down inverted world can put anything at the top of that hierarchy. And I guess the flying spaghetti monster will do. So when our commentator says, quote, I will cease being an atheist and become spiritual or whatever, when all of these pretty post hoc connections and symbols will make a difference in allowing me to understand the nature of the universe outside my insignificant tiny life. Unquote. All I can say is this, you are already spiritual. You’ve told me yourself. It’s only that you’re trying to throw mud up in the air, throw mud up into the heavens in the hope that you can then worship it.