Video Transcript: Lesson 4

Welcome back. Let's start with a brief review on the board. I have put again the  definition that I defended as the proper definition of a religious belief. Notice, I'm  not characterizing religion in general or a religion, but what is a religious belief?  And once again, it starts a belief, is a religious belief, and then IFF means if, and 

only if, it's a belief in something as the divine reality that is the origin of all else.  Or divine means self existent. Or it's a belief about how the non divine depends  on the divine. Or it's a belief about how humans can come to stand in proper  relation to the Divine, and that's what formal religions are about, helping people  to stand in proper relation to the divinity as they think of the divinity. Notice that  the last part is also important, that the Divine is the self existent reality, no matter how else it is, further characterized so you have in Judaism and Christianity and  Islam, the Divine is God, and God is the transcendent creator and the personal  God who enters into his creation and offers human beings redemption. You have in Hinduism and Buddhism that the Divine is not a being at all and not personal.  It's the Beingness that's in everything, and it is the only real thing all that  appears to be non divine because it comes into being and passes away, is the  illusory world called Maya, M, a, y, a, that's anything that comes into being and  passes away, anything that changes, anything that's limited, anything that can  be perceived, that can be conceived, is Maya. So there the Divine is further  characterized by not being characterized. There's no characterization you can  make. Buddhists would say we don't characterize divine at all. That's right.  That's why they call the divine nothingness, not a thing that can't be conceived  of as a thing, but far from being literally nothing, it's the only thing that really is in itself existent, and it goes under a number of names. I gave this to before  suchness, Dharmakaya, nothingness and so on, many different names in that  tradition. So this was the, this is the definition that we came up with. Then what  we're going to be talking about is belief in God in particular, in the rest of the  course, and how we can know, or what can we know that God is real with the  emphasis on the word know, not can we believe it? Of course, we can believe it.  Are we entitled to say that we know it? It's not a belief that is a mere opinion or  hope, but a belief that we have are justified in saying we can be certain of is that case? Can we ever be certain? And the answer is going to be yes. We'll explain  how. Now, before we leave all that for concentrating just on belief in God and  whether belief in God is a justified belief, and in what sense and so on, I'd like to trade a little more off of this in order to contrast some of the other ways of  thinking about the relation of God to the world of the Divine to the non divine.  And what I'm going to do is use circles. I'm going to use a solid circle to mean  the divine reality and a dotted circle to mean the non divine reality. So the way I  would define this, if it was just theism, if it was a diagram that was going to cover Judaism, Christianity and Islam, then it would look like this. so the cosmos is  non divine. It depends on God. That's what the arrow means. And the  relationship between God and the cosmos is also something God creates. That 

is, prior to creating the world, God didn't have the property of being the creator  of the world, right? But after he created it, he had the property being the creator  of the world. He stands in that relation. It's a relational property. Now that's that  

characterizes all three theistic religions, but it leaves something to be desired for Christianity, because Christianity has an additional doctrine that Judaism and  Islam lack. Jews and Muslims are at one in condemning Christians for this  difference. But I think it's the crucial difference that makes Christianity right and  sensible in ways. That the other two can't match. We'll come to that in a bit. But  here's the way I would, I would schematize with the diagrams the Christian idea. And what this shows is that in the Incarnation, God takes created things into  himself. This is clearest in the doctrine of the Incarnation. Doctrine of the  Incarnation says that Jesus, Christ, of Nazareth was not only the Messiah  promised to the Jews, but the very incarnation of God Himself. And Muslims and Jews both object. Wait a minute. The main point of our religion is that nothing  created is divine, and that's right, but that's not the way Christians explain the  incarnation. And I'm going to quote here from some of the writing that's attached to the Athanasian Creed. It is not that in the Incarnation, our humanity became  divine, but that the dog, but that the divine took our humility, humanity into  himself, so we are not violating that. This is still a dotted line. It's still Jesus  Christ as a human being is still a creature, but God takes Christ into himself in  such a way that Jesus Christ becomes the human side of God, and God  becomes the divine side of Jesus Christ. So we need a different diagram. We  need a different schema for it. And by the way, I'm going to argue in another  course. I'm going to do sometime that. And that God's having taken into himself,  created something created is the way God made himself known. Always, right  from the very beginning of Revelation, God attributes characteristics to himself.  He likes this. He's pleased with that. He's angry with this. He talks to people. He  makes them promises, he enters into fellowship with them. All those are  creation. They're all created things. They're not self existent. But God has  always then taken on characteristics they're self existent. He's taken on relations that are created, and the relations have characteristics that are created. That's  how we can know God, even saying God is One is still attributing to God a  quantity, a uniqueness, however you want to put it, it's still something created.  It's a feature of creation. That's the point that I'll come back to much later. But it's based on the Eastern Orthodox theology and on the theology of a few other  people, such as John Calvin and Karl Barth. Calvin says about these  characteristics, every perfection ascribed to God in Scripture is found in  creation, and hence is not God per se, but how God relates to us. That's the  position I'm going to defend. That's scheme this way. Now let's look at some of  the other revisions and see how they do it. So again, I have some housekeeping to do here. Now these little Venn diagrams are helpful, I think, but they have  limitations too, and I'll point out some of those limitations. Now let's take the 

view that is called in philosophy, naturalism. This would look like this. This is the  universe. Some part of it is the self existent part that all the rest depends on.  There have been many candidates for that in ancient Greece, earth, air, fire,  water, atoms, Epicurious. Thought it was atoms, atoms in space, and they  combined to make everything else, also in ancient Greece. However, there was  a dualistic version. There are two divinities, not one, and the one side, the  divinity Plato called form. This has to do with logic and mathematics and all  that's rational, that's also self existent, and the other side is matter. And this side organizes this side. The reason matter isn't just a chaos is that it has order  wherever it has order is subject to some kind of rationality, and human rationality is also a little piece of this. So humans also have this division. This is Mind and  Body, or soul and body when it comes to a human being. So their their view of  how the divine related to the non divine, generally throughout the cosmos, is  concentrated and imitated over again in their doctrine of what human nature is  like. A human is a combination of a non physical, rational mind or soul and a  physical body that's there, but this is a naturalist point of view. It's still deifying,  making divine some elements that are found in the something that's found in the cosmos. Now, as over against naturalism, in both its one divinity and two divinity forms, there is also another, and this is a view that has a traditional name, that  isn't quite exactly right. The traditional name is pantheism, which means  everything is God. But that's not quite right. It's everything is divine. And I've  been talking about Hinduism and Buddhism, and I'm going to schematize it this  way, the non divine. What appears to be non divine, the illusory reality of Maya  is contained within is part of that is generated by the Divine which is not a  person, not a God, not an individual, but being itself, the ineffable, divine reality  that includes and encompasses everything else. And the reason that this  schema is limited is that this solid line should be infinitely big. There's no end to  it, the world we live in and experience, the world that we deal with in life and  death, that's all illusion that's to be rejected. So the basic insight of this tradition  is that it is in humans, how humans stand in proper relation to the Divine, is to  distance themselves, to reject the non divine. You are you and I, according to  this tradition, are doomed to be reborn into life after life after life of suffering,  until and unless we come to the insight that all this stuff that goes on isn't real,  and the real is the divine and only it is real, and then we will be delivered of  being reborn, and we will be absorbed into the divine. This is an entirely different view of reality, human nature, human destiny. A guy who has a materialist has  an entirely different view. Bertrand Russell said at one time he's a materialist, he said, Well, I am old and I love life, but I know that when I die, I will rot and that  will be the end of me. That's one idea of human destiny and human nature. It's  just physical. Doesn't matter what we do. Russell has a very eloquent statement  of this, all man's greatest accomplishments, the brilliant a noonday sun of the  sciences will all disappear, and it will be the same as if it never existed that's 

motivated by his being a materialist, he says, blind to our ambitions and hopes  and loves omnipotent matter rolls on. It's a divinity belief, not a Christian one,  not a Hindu one, but it's a divinity belief. Now these are samples of different  ways of conceiving of the relation of the Divine to the non divine, no matter how  the Divine is characterized, so that there are all kinds of competing ways of  thinking of this, and there are competing ways of thinking of this. Hindus and  Buddhists aren't quite exactly the same. And there, the two of them are closer to one another than to Taoism, about how the non divine depends on the divine. So different descriptions of precisely how the Divine is further characterized enter  into this when you come into concrete positions taken by people, beliefs taken  by people. But that is how this gets divided up. I call these dependency  arrangements. Remember, part two of our definition was how the non divine  depends on the divine. Here are some schemas that illustrate that if we played  with these circles, we could come up with a lot more schemas, but they don't  exist in the world. All the world religions have held only to about three one of  three possibilities. I played around with these circles one day, and, you know, it  had two distinct divinities and being partly overlapped and not and all that stuff,  and came up with about 14 arrangements. They don't exist. So maybe you want  to move to California and start your own religion. You can take one of these  schemas that nobody's ever tried. Good luck to you. That's sarcasm. I don't wish anybody Good luck taking those because none of them are the truth, which is  probably why nobody's bothered with them. Well, here's our definition. Here are  some ideas about how the divine relates to the non divine. And then we come to the last one. How do humans come to stand in proper relation to the divine? And that's what most of the traditional religions concentrate on they have all the  doctrines and the practices and the Holy Days, whether it's just meditation and  get yourself to the point where you reject the world around you and you are no  longer attached to it. It could be that simple, or it could be as elaborate as  thinking that the divine entered into our life, came incarnate in a human being,  and to redeem the entire cosmos and us along with it, two utterly different ideas. But you recognize the second one is the Christian one. That's for all of you who  are going to be Christian leaders as well as Christians. And for those of you who are not Christians and want to give it a fair shake, we're going to talk about the  grounds for believing that. And I did mention last time, and I just remind you of it  now that we are not contrasting faith to reason. It's not the case that if a divinity  belief shows up in a scientific theory or in a scientific context or a non religious  context, that it's not a religious belief. It is, no matter where it shows up. And it's  not that in one case, they're taken on reason and the other on faith, because  that's not the way the New Testament speaks about faith at all. We'll come to  that, and I will repeat something that I said in the earlier sessions. There is not a  religion on this planet and never has been his official writings ask anyone to take it on. Blind faith. That's an accusation that some people like to make. I won't 

mention any names, the ones initials or Richard Dawkins, that religion asks you  to believe on blind faith. So it's the opposite of science, which investigates things rationally and gives reasons. That's just not So, folks, and it never has been.  What Every religion has said is the same thing Christianity says, and Judaism  and Islam and Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism all say the same thing. You  believe this. You are a genuine believer, if and only if, you come to see this as  true for yourself. You experience it as true as certain. Now, there are certainly  tribal religions that don't have anything that elaborate. They don't have an  elaborate theology. They don't say why. They just hand on belief in the gods and so on. But they don't say, take this blindly, they are recommending it on the past  experience of their ancestors or the present tribal leaders who experience it as  true, so on. And maybe relatively simple, we would might even say crude,  compared to an elaborate Hindu or an elaborate Christian theology. But all the  same, nobody in those traditions is saying, just believe this because we say so,  or take it on blind faith. Just for the record, I don't think anybody ever takes any  belief on blind faith. We would normally regard that as just stupid. Say, Well,  here's x, y and z, and you should believe this. Why should I believe that? Oh, no reason. No, we always have a reason, some reason. However attenuated,  however poor, we have some reason for just about anything. We believe. You  believe there's such a place as Bangkok, even if you haven't been there  because a lot of people have been in there. There are photographs and  encyclopedias and travelogs and other you meet other people who say, Yeah,  I've been there interesting place. So that's you have a reason. The idea of blind  faith is inimical, not just the science, but to religion and to common sense.  Nobody does it. So that ends this session. I give you time now to think about  this, go over your notes, and we'll reconvene and begin to talk. And when we  reconvene, about religious experience, what that means and how that's to be  characterized, types of that we'll stop there for today.