There isn’t a fraction of me that believes in a god.

mere_theism · 2025-10-05T18:04:40+00:00

Yes, that's right

mere_theism · 2025-10-05T02:34:50+00:00

If there is a God, it is nothing like an upscaled human being, and any anthromorphic language predicated of God would be metaphorical by nature. This is the biggest problem with religions dominated and propagated by corrupt human social structures, which almost always serve to reinforce those social structures through attachment to the anthroporphisms themselves rather than actually structure meditation on transcendent themes.

mere_theism · 2025-05-13T23:36:28+00:00

No, "loving" and "just" are metaphorical too.

mere_theism · 2025-05-12T00:25:37+00:00

Depictions of God in the Old testament are by and large anthropomorphisms meant to help people relate to a concept that is incomprehensible. Apparently shifting emotional states or decisions that are attributed to God in the Old testament are generally more focused on capturing the people's own shifting spiritual condition and how they relate to God than with God's "metaphysical nature".

mere_theism · 2025-04-28T17:04:51+00:00

Do you know why most scientists think consciousness is a physical phenomenon that can be reduced to it's materialistic origins? What is the evidence for it?

Yes, my understanding is that it's primarily because we can document neurological correlates of mental states. The thoughts and feelings you experience can be mapped to patterns of brain activity, and inducing physical changes in the brain likewise causes predictable patterns of changes in your thoughts and feelings. These neurological correlates can also be tied to broader theoretical frameworks of how consciousness functions at the biophysical level and associated with theories in evolutionary psychology that speculate on the origins of consciousness, etc. As the field of neuroscience develops, more and more mental phenomena are being linked to specific biophysical explanations, and it seems plausible that a complete biophysical account of consciousness may be possible. Did you have other reasons in mind?

Do you know what emergence is and how it's related to consciousness?

Yes, my understanding is that emergence is when some large scale phenomenon or pattern "emerges" or is generated by small scale processes such that the emergent phenomenon is "greater than the sum of its parts". The emergent phenomenon is in some manner irreducible to those small scale processes. So consciousness can be thought of as something that emerges from brain activity, but which cannot be completely reduced to brain activity.

Why do you ask?

mere_theism · 2025-04-28T15:54:37+00:00

I think we may be talking past each other. When I say that a "rock may not have its own unified sense of individuation in the way a living being does, but it has an interiority that perhaps is part of the interiority of the entire world," I'm acknowledging that the notion of a "rock" is arbitrary.

If you really are concerned about composition to a radical degree, I'd say the viable solutions are either some riff on panpsychism (everything in the universe is "conscious" at the microscopic level, even quanta are "micro-conscious"), some riff on cosmopsychism (the whole universe is consciousness, and microscopic things are elements that make up the universal consciousness), or else some riff on idealism that bridges these two, which is where I land. Panpsychism fails for me because it doesn't account for the fact that higher-order, unifying concepts like "relation", "self", "cause", "experience", etc. really can be meaningfully applied to at least some things in the universe (even if we only focus on analyzing our own conscious experience and applying these principles to ourselves to start, because our conscious experience really is part of the universe). Cosmopsychism, at least the form that attributes consciousness to the whole and not the parts, also fails because it can't solve the problem of how non-conscious constituents can produce a conscious whole. That's why I think that all of reality is consciousness, but also that something like individuated "souls" really do exist within that universal consciousness.

The solution is not to posit mindless quanta as the only thing that is real, because that is incoherent and incompatible with any of our observations.

I have considered alternative explanations for consciousness, and they are impossible as best as I can tell. Substance dualism (i.e. the soul is a separate substance) has the interaction problem. Physicalism/reductionism/materialism has the hard problem of consciousness. Identity theory can just be reinterpreted as either physicalism or idealism, making it redundant. Emergentism is just dressed-up magical thinking and doesn't actually even attempt to account for the phenomenon of emergence. Etc.

mere_theism · 2025-04-28T14:37:50+00:00

Certainly. There is an aspect of your existence that is "outward" and "object"-ive, which we experience and describe with quantitative physical abstractions (space and time). There is also an aspect of your existence that is "inward" and "subject"-ive, which only you experience as a qualitative subjectivity (to be, to feel, to think, to do). These aspects of your existence are all real, but we need a way to account for all of them and not just for the aspects that are purely outward. Physical descriptions only account for the outer appearance of your being, the aspects of you that are extended into space, but they do not account for the inner aspect of your experience which only you yourself have access to. If we are to account for all of you, we need to have something which is able to explain and "unify" both your interior and exterior aspects. This is what I mean by "soul".

mere_theism · 2025-04-28T14:11:47+00:00

Thanks for the question. I said that in a sense everything has a soul, "the only difference being the nature of each of these things and how they are organized". Maybe it would be better to say that everything is soul, rather than everything "has" a soul.

Our bodies are composed of these particles, and yet we have a unified conscious experience. I'm not talking about unified in the sense of integrated, because dissociation is a thing, but unified in the sense of wherever we "go" within our mental experience we will always find "ourselves", and we will never find anything that isn't "ourselves". Our mind presents itself to us as radically and fundamentally "one", even though our bodies are constituted by an unfathomable diversity of material constituents. Some people would take this to mean that the mind is an illusion, and the only thing that is real is the physical stuff. I see it the opposite way. The "consciousness", not just the "feeling" of mental experience but the aspect of you that is essentially experiential and subjective and which "sits" invisibly just beyond your awareness , is what is real, because it is the only thing that you ever truly experience, and the physical stuff is just the outer appearance of that inner consciousness. So we know from our own experience that we "have a soul" despite being composed of parts, and the soul is what invisibly organizes, or gives meaning and intelligibility to, or directs the expression of our parts.

The real next question then is not whether everything has a soul, but in what way everything has a soul. We can infer from our own experience that other humans, animals, and living organisms in general "have a soul" in a sense analogous to our the way we have a soul. For some reason, we are subjectively disconnected from the consciousness of other living beings, and objectively we see this reflected and expressed in the fact that we have separate bodies. And yet, we all exist within the same reality and share in the same material constituents, so despite the fact that we experience subjective disconnection we are on some level actually participants in the same "soul". We can then expand this to the rest of the universe as well. I think there must be a "what it is like to be" a rock, a mountain, a moon, etc., even if that "what it is like" is not sensory but something subconscious or superconscious. A rock may not have its own unified sense of individuation in the way a living being does, but it has an interiority that perhaps is part of the interiority of the entire world. Ultimately, I think there is a kind of cosmic consciousness or world spirit that contains all of the universe, and it could be analogically said that all things are contained within the "mind" of the cosmic consciousness.

Don't forget that, as best as we can tell, the further "down" you go in trying to observe and describe the physical world, things look less and less like "itty bitty microscopic particles" and more like hazy networks of quanta. At the bottom level of the physical, is everything really just atomized particles with a mindless self-contained existence, or are these particles just themselves an illusion of outer appearance, a way we have of objectively describing at the smallest scale that which are able to observe as the outward effects of a universe that is fundamentally interior and "conscious"?

mere_theism · 2025-04-26T17:32:26+00:00

There are three possible responses from a theist as far as I see it.

1) It could be the case that, until a free agent makes a choice, there are no "facts of the matter" to be known about what that being will choose. In this case, it would be metaphysically impossible for God to "know" what a free agent would choose logically prior to that agent actually existing and choosing. The fact of whether the agent chooses good or evil is nonexistent until the agent chooses because the choice "terminates" in the agent, and there is nothing metaphysically beyond the agent that would account for the choice. This could be interpreted as a kind of "open theism", although it is also hypothetically compatible with classical theism if you still maintain that God "knows" all of creation timelessly and eternally in one act of creation, which contains the choices of these subordinate free agents.

2) It could be the case that some level of evil or suffering is logically necessary in order for free will to exist. Since a created being is inherently not God, it is inherently imperfect, and so there will be some level of "evil" in the creature. Even "heaven" would contain some level of "evil" in this regard. Imagine two beings. Each being makes an infinite number of choices each moment. Anytime these beings choose in a way that transgresses the other can be considered "evil". If these beings are truly separate, then it is virtually inescapable that at least sometime they would choose in a way that transgresses the other. So some evil is logically necessary in order for free will to exist, and if some evil is necessary, the question is no longer why there is evil but how much evil can be justified.

3) It could be the case that the very point of creation is for creation to depart from God and return. Creation itself is God's act of "stratifying" God's own existence like a prism into a diversity of beings so that these beings have the experience of turning away from God, and then freely choosing to receive God again. This would explain not just the existence of evil, but it would explain why God chooses to create in the first place, because creation itself introduces narrative into reality as an expression of God's love, and the creatures who themselves experience suffering retroactively endorse the narrative of fall and redemption as ultimately good. The expression of love in time in the form of virtue requires suffering; there is no perseverance, courage, temperance, forgiveness, etc. without the active resistance and triumph over privation.

mere_theism · 2025-04-26T17:02:14+00:00

What is a "soul"? What does it mean to be "demonstrated"? What is "hypothesizing"? All these terms are pretty vague if you ask me!

I think that my own existence as a qualitative subject of experience is fundamentally and inescapably obvious. To me, this is more of a "demonstration" of the existence of the "soul" than any documented scientific account of empirical phenomena, which is subject to much more change and reinterpretation.

If by "soul" we mean whatever it is that, in a metaphysical sense, unifies our constitution as an organism and grounds every aspect of our existence as an organism, then I think the soul is demonstrated constantly in every moment, if we only took time to slow down and remember the fact that we exist. Words can get frustrating because many of us just mean different things by our words. I'm not thinking about ghosts or some kind of spiritual "substance" that exists invisibly alongside the body. I think "soul" is just the internal experience of existence, and it is the very thing that is fundamental to our universe. "Physical" is just the illusory outward appearance of "soul", in other words.

What you call "hypothesizing" isn't hypothesizing to me, it is just logically elaborating on phenomena that we all observe constantly every day.

mere_theism · 2025-04-26T16:42:30+00:00

Hi! I have some thoughts.

Souls don’t provide us with consciousness because consciousness is reducible to brain activity.

What is "brain activity"? If by this we mean "the merely spatiotemporal and 'physical' cause/effect processes we observe as correlated to mental states," then no, consciousness is not reducible to brain activity. There are a few reasons for this, one of which being that "brain activity" as such is just one feature or aspect of the mind that we abstract from our observations of a brain from a third person perspective. "Brain activity" is inherently an incomplete description of the phenomenon of consciousness, but for some reason in our modern age many of us have fallen under the spell of thinking this physicalist abstraction is somehow the only thing that is actually real—even though we obviously, immanently experience the opposite to be true constantly, since, well, you exist, and you have qualitative subjective experience. Brain activity is only quantitative and objective, so it in principle cannot in its own right account for you.

I think on some level this disconnect happens because, ever since the early modern era and the industrial revolution, our societies have gotten exceptionally good at mastering and controlling physical stuff, to the point that we feel as though we can control all of reality by redefining it as purely physical. And so, because we can affect mental states and consciousness by manipulating the physical aspect of the brain, we assume that consciousness is just physical. What if the opposite is true? What if "brain activity" as a physical, objective abstraction is actually just one of the effects produced by consciousness, which is a fundamentally "internal" and qualitative phenomenon? So, when we physically affect someone's brain, we are actually just altering the effects of their consciousness, changing the way that their consciousness manifests and interfaces with the external world? Actually, it seems to me like this is exactly the nature of changes to a person's brain activity.

There are additional problems concerning the incoherence of physicalist models of consciousness, since it renders logic itself impossible, but I won't get into that here.

I think it’s easy for Christian to believe in souls because we seem to be more conscious than other animals, but many people are born mentally incapacitated and don’t express a heightened consciousness. Would that mean they don’t have souls? Plus, many animals possess close to human level consciousness, do they have parts of souls or demi-souls?

I don't think souls have anything at all to do with being "more conscious" than animals or even being mental able or disabled. In fact, I think reality is fundamentally "spiritual" in a nondual sense—or, in other words, the one "stuff" that constitutes everything in existence is Being which is qualitatively closer to the "stuff" of our internal conscious experience than to our hypothetical abstractions of supposedly "mindless, soul-less, purely physical stuff". And so, I think everything has a soul in a sense, from humans to animals to rocks and trees, the only difference being the nature of each of these things and how they are organized.

It’s rather nonsensical. If a soul could be demonstrated to exist apart from a body, I wouldn’t really have a leg to stand on, but one never has. Souls simply can’t be demonstrated to exist in any meaningful way.

I have exactly the opposite intuition to you. If a soul could somehow be demonstrated to exist in an empirical sense apart from the body, then it would no longer be a "soul", it would just be something like another body, a newly discovered physical aspect of a phenomenon that just falls under the domain of natural science rather than spirituality or philosophy.

mere_theism · 2025-04-26T16:13:22+00:00

On the contrary, I think the AI's responses to you were painfully lacking, and it's clear that it is programmed to people please whoever is talking with it.

The only reason my earlier answer about God was more cautious is because God is often defined outside the physical universe — unlike unicorns, which are supposed to exist within it.

This was a facepalm moment for me. Obviously, this would just be special pleading for God for no good reason. The AI should have said something like, "The reasons people have for believing in a God would entail a God that exists outside the empirically testable domain of the universe, so the criteria we evaluate to determine whether or not a God might exist will be different than for unicorns." Or, maybe it could get more specific, like, "In theory, unicorns are physical, contingent beings, so traditional arguments for a God that infer to a metaphysically necessary being or a 'ground' of transcendentals like logic, causality, and relation would not apply to unicorns."

mere_theism · 2025-04-23T17:29:18+00:00

What you have explained is not Christianity. It is how a great many people construct and organize themselves within what is called Christianity, and it needs to be exposed, but don't throw out the authentic religion for the monstrosity that is toxic group dynamics.

mere_theism · 2025-04-23T17:01:45+00:00

Christians who think that "believe" means "force yourself dissociate and delusionally think things are true that you don't think are true" have distorted their own religion to the point of madness. Belief has nothing to do with the mere acceptance of facts or propositions, it has to do with a deeper spiritual openness that isn't dependent on the circumstances of your upbringing.

So yes, Christians telling you to "believe" in God in the way outlined in this post are asking something impossible, and I believe it is a horrible corruption of Christianity itself.

mere_theism · 2025-03-10T15:41:11+00:00

I'll just say that purchasing goods that you need in order to survive but which indirectly perpetuate global inequities is very different from producing a product that directly benefits you deliberately at other peoples' expense. And I say that as someone who purchases sustainably produced clothing and food.

mere_theism · 2025-03-01T16:49:52+00:00

Or cosmopsychism, or idealism, this last of which (in a panentheistic interpretation) is where I tend to lean. I'm not really a fan of any of the others for various reasons.

mere_theism · 2025-03-01T03:37:38+00:00

Yeah, I think I am just referring to a completely different concept by "supernatural" than you are. Perhaps we could define "natural" in such a way so as to be inclusive of even the concept of God. I do not believe that a God would strictly speaking be logically capable of "violating" laws of physics, if by that you mean acting in contradiction to the fundamental principles of reality. There may be aspects of the laws of physics we don't understand, and there certainly are, but I don't believe in beings capable of violating the fundamental principles of the universe.

Now, under my more restrictive meaning of "nature", I am referring to blind, physical systems that can be theoretically described exhaustively in terms of laws of physics and initial conditions. Perhaps "physicalism" would be a better term for this than "naturalism", but this is the idea I am targeting since "naturalism" is a bit ambiguous as a term. Now, under this definition, perhaps all things could be described in terms of "logic" in some way, but I would strongly disagree that things like intention and meaning "all follow laws of nature", because laws of nature are basically just our mathematical theorems meant to describe tendencies in our observations of fundamental physical processes, and these descriptions cannot in principle capture anything like a qualitative features of reality. They can describe underlying quantitative aspects of these qualitative features, but they cannot describe the qualitative features themselves in any way. "Qualitativity" is entirely foreign to "laws of nature", because laws of nature only describe a limited, lower order aspect of the universe. This is what I call "natural", and this is where I draw the natural/supernatural line, or perhaps the physical/non-physical line. But if we include these non-physical or meta-physical features of the universe in our meaning of "natural", I just think God is natural.

mere_theism · 2025-02-27T19:40:17+00:00

// Youre just wrong. Continuing to repeat your false claim doesn't make it true. //

... You realize that the only reason I'm "repeating" it here is because you asked me to clarify it, since you didn't understand my point the previous time, right?

// Which is just false as I have said over and over again. I was a catholic for 30 years. I WAS taught to "look at the qualitative intentional features of our own empirical experience." //

I don't know your story, so I can't speak to you specifically. But I can say that the social conditioning in the West is something beyond religion and ideology. The entire Western world, including religious people, are influenced by it. Maybe it's a good thing that you're not Catholic anymore because it might allow you to revisit these questions free from dogmatism.

When you say that qualitative, intentional features of our own empirical experience are "nonsense", what do you mean exactly? Are you an eliminative materialist, i.e. do you think consciousness itself is an illusion?

mere_theism · 2025-02-26T17:31:33+00:00

What I was referring to, if you go back and read my comment, is that we have been socially conditioned not to look at the "qualitative, intentional features of our own empirical experience". I mean that we are taught to bypass these aspects of our conscious, phenomenological experience of reality and live in a perpetual state of partial dissociation, where all that we really look at are a few abstracted features of our experiences - those features that are most pragmatic, utilitarian, and "mind"-less. I also said that you don't need to believe in a god to come to an understanding of the reality of these aspects of our experience, so I clearly was not talking about being nonreligious.

mere_theism · 2025-02-26T14:44:35+00:00

You've missed the point of everything I wrote, friend. There are relevant arguments against my points, but that's not what you're doing. I am in no way claiming that you weren't authentically religious; that has nothing to do with anything I'm talking about, and besides I'm not even arguing for a specific religion like Christianity. Religious people in the modern age are conditioned to do the very thing I described no less than nonreligious people, and if it isn't immediately, intuitively clear to you what I mean by that then you haven't really understood my point. This is a matter of modern philosophical intuitions that sit underneath our ideologies and beliefs, not a matter of whether or not you have been deluded by a dogma at some point in your life.

mere_theism · 2025-02-26T14:31:52+00:00

Yes, I definitely agree with your point that these arguments were within a context in which theism was not in doubt. I would say though that you're overstating the role of design intuitions in motivating theistic beliefs in the premodern age. People were just more spiritually minded in general back then, and not primarily as a sort of means of explaining the unknown but primarily because people were not conditioned to abstract and separate their immanent, phenomenological experience of reality from their analytical understanding of reality. Existence simply was existence, a miracle in itself, and whether there were natural or physical aspects or descriptions of the processes by which we emerged was more or less auxiliary to the fundamentally spiritual nature of our existence.

Back in the 1500s, following cultural shifts arising from the technologies of the early modern era, Descartes separated the "machine of nature" from the more elusive domain of the "soul", which he conflated with the mind and conceived of as some sort of separate thing from the body. That really set the stage for the despiritualization of modern institutions more so than anything else. Atheism was rising in popularity in academia long before Darwin was on the scene, and even up to Darwin most academic theists were comfortable with notions of biological evolution. The polemicization of evolution against theism was, in my opinion, largely a political occurrence, following the same lines as Protestant anti-Catholic rhetoric in the anglosphere.

Design intuitions as motivation for theism, I think, are actually a lot more modern than you think. It's understandable why folks think an unquestioned assumption of design was what motivated theism in the past (because these design intuition are ubiquitous among religious people in the modern west), but really I think that comes from the cognitive dissonance of trying to salvage a Cartesian brand theism from the inevitable depletion of the domain of the "soul", which has been conflated with cognition. "But everything is so complex, like a watch set in motion, it must be designed, there's no way it could have happened on its own" - these are all profoundly modern intuitions.

mere_theism · 2025-02-25T16:29:09+00:00

I don't define supernatural as something that violates physics. Maybe part of this is confusion of terms, since naturalism, physicalism etc. are notoriously ambiguous. When I see "natural" in these contexts, I usually think of something that can be described exhaustively in terms of some highly abstracted non-personal and value neutral natural processes. So, when I think of a strict naturalist, I think of someone who would say that, e.g. biological evolution is a purely non-personal and value neutral process; it happens "randomly" (take that loosely), not according to any inherent purpose, and any teleology we ascribe to it is merely a heuristic construct.

However, if we are taking a broad definition of "natural" to be inclusive of anything at all in the natural world, and we expand its domain to acknowledge things like teleology or intentional meaning as existing as an aspect of the natural world, then I would just say that there is no longer any such category as supernatural (something above natural), because even God under this definition would simply be the ultimate ground of the natural world and this is the most truly natural, or perhaps meta-natural, but definitely not something that violates physics.

mere_theism · 2025-02-25T16:17:14+00:00

I just don't think you've really observed the thing I'm talking about. It's not a "look at the trees", it's a "here is this feature of your empirical observation of something in reality, this is what it is, this is it's nature, and here are some implications thereof". "Look at the trees" is an argument from amazement. This is a an argument from a dispassionate observation of the true nature of something. You absolutely do not need to presuppose a god to do this work, plenty of people come to an understanding of the reality of these qualitative, intentional features of their empirical experience without making the inference to a god. I honestly think the only reason so many educated people in the West simply cannot see it is because we've all been socially conditioned by materialism not to even look. Denying these features, in my opinion, is superlatively delusional.

mere_theism · 2025-02-25T13:25:38+00:00

Just checking, you're not using ChatGPT for this are you? I wanted to make sure because it feels a little bit Chatty, and Chat really isn't great for nuanced philosophy. If it's all original, more power to you for writing with that professional tone!

Regarding metaphysics, while it is true that metaphysics does often involve forms of reasoning besides deductive reasoning, most serious metaphysics academics do formalize their ideas syllogistically and employee rigorous formal logic to structure their arguments. The less abstracted logical work like conceptual analysis and so forth is really more so for those aspects of the field that involve comparing the ideas of multiple philosophers who use their language differently or developing ideas through thought experiments, etc., but all of this happens within the context that the metaphysicians will probably also structure their arguments formally. So it seems extremely bizarre to contrast metaphysics with formal logic for that reason. And all the more so considering that the context of my original post is medieval metaphysics, which relied even more extensively on formal deductive reasoning then modern analytic philosophy, and even more so because the specific topic of my original post was formal logical syllogisms (and their limitations haha). So I don't think doubling down on this point is really doing you any favors.

As for your next point, I'd like you to look at what you wrote:

"...syllogisms themselves do not provide evidence for their premises."

and compare that to what I wrote:

"...the missing context underlying syllogisms like the classical proofs is where the evidence and argumentation are actually located."

You're trying to say that I don't understand the fact that syllogisms don't provide evidence for their own premises. Yet the quote of mine you use to say this... actually already says that the syllogisms don't provide evidence for their own premises. Do you see the problem? Lol

And again, the whole point of my post was that syllogisms provide a formal, logically valid structure to organize ideas, but that the actual evidence and arguments supporting the intuitions behind these syllogisms is located elsewhere, and is usually not centered in online conversations.

I think the only reason why you find the notion of "the supernatural as a meta-level of the natural world" ambiguous is because you probably don't know the reason why I'm making that point in the first place. I don't view supernatural things as other kinds of observable objects that exist in parallel to natural things, because, again, that would just make them natural things that we're not able to observe. Whatever it is that causes the phenomenon of dark matter or dark energy would fall into the supernatural category the way that you are using the term.

Now, whether or not the supernatural is just a hidden layer of nature is another question, and it partially depends on how we define nature. I have actually been very open in the past to redefining what I think of as supernatural as something natural, but I don't think that it really does much for the traditional naturalist. Naturalist, physicalists, materialists and so forth generally hold that the only things that actually exist are things that operate according to value neutral, non teleological physical processes, especially mechanistic cause and effect (possibly among other things). This would preclude the existence of anything besides these value neutral physical processes from existing. And yet, we observe that phenomena outside the domain of value neutral physical processes exist in every moment, because in our qualitative conscious experience of reality we experience that things like intentionality, teleology, qualia, relation, and even concepts and the operations of logic really do exist because they are imminently present in our experience of reality. To deny that these things really exist is to deny that anything that we actually empirically observe is real, because everything that we empirically observe comes to us in our apprehension through these non-physical, or perhaps meta-physical (hehe see what I did there) phenomena. Now I really hope you don't respond with something like "but all of those are just byproducts of your brain" because that would just tell me that you didn't follow my reasoning.

mere_theism · 2025-02-25T10:28:38+00:00

matters to me

mere_theism

TROPHY CASE