The Face of God

17 Feb 2026 - 21 Feb 2026

As for the atheists themselves, they typically deduce from the scientific worldview two far-reaching metaphysical doctrines. First, that everything in the natural world, human thought and action included, happens in accordance with scientific laws, so that the same laws govern events in the atom and events in the galaxy, events in the ocean and events in the mind. Secondly, that everything that happens is contingent. There is no reason that it should happen, other than the fact that it happens, in the sequence dictated by the laws of nature. There is no final explanation of why the world exists: it just does.

The first yes, except we allow for emergence of new laws at different levels of organization, but they are still fully causal.

The second, that word "contingent" wtf does it mean? This seems to be a symptom of diseased thinking but I can't quite diagnose the problem. But I hate that word (JFM uses it all the time).

We know that the universe is without a plan and without a goal – not because we have looked for those things and failed to find them, butbecause nothing discoverable to science could countas a plan or a goal for the universe in its entirety. Plans and goals are biological features of individual organisms, which are systems within the on-going stream of physical events, just like everything else. (emph added)

This seems like it hides a fundamental misunderstanding of things. Contingent means caused, which is the opposite of random. (I think he means there is a felt need for some justificatory layer to the cosmos).

Ah well he is aware of anthropic principle (links it to "transcendtial idealism" of Kant, OK)

The astonishing thing about our universe – that it contains rational consciousness, judgement, the knowledge of right and wrong, and all the other things that make the human condition so singular – is not rendered less astonishing by the hypothesis that this state of affairs emerged over time from other conditions...But is this astonishment just a blank astonishment, one that can never be solaced with an explanation?

A detour into Aristotelian cause which I think is confused (about science, not Aristotle)

... belief is a form of membership when it defines a community. Bysigning up to the doctrine you are incorporated into the community. And this incorporation is regularly reaffirmed through sacred rites that signify, insome way, the collective relation of the community to its God. It is, of course, absurd to think in that way of scientific beliefs, which offer nothing by way of membership and indeed nothing save themselves,

Hm. A lot of transhumanist error can be traced by trying to have community part without god.

In other words what is, from the scientific view, a defect in religious belief – namely that it has the authority of a community – is from the theological point of view a strength. For it is this connection with the community that enables us to bridge the gap opened by the arguments of the philosophers, and to find the transcendental God that is allegedly proved by those arguments as a real presence in our world

It's about the nature of religious belief, which (I must keep reminding myself) is totally without interest. Atheism is as pointless as theism.

this God is understood not through metaphysical speculations concerning the ground of being, but through communion withour fellow humans.

Some laborious arguments against evolutionary psychology or animal behavior based explanations of human functioning. These seem misguided to me. Humans may have more glorified inspirations for their thoughts and actions than mere animal instict, but the whole hierarchy-of-being thing is wrong. Humans are not superior or inferior to animals, they are animals, with some extra layers to be sure, but that layer is not superior, it is not meant to rule over the others (wanted to say higher and lower, that is the common metaphor. Maybe "outer" and "inner" would work better)

Yet there are two things that I know about myself as subject, and about which I cannot be mistaken, since any argument against them would presuppose their truth. The first is that I am a unified centre of consciousness

Ah OK well here's where I get off the boat. No you aren't. It's illusory, and if you don't like the Minsky critique of single-self, how about the Buddha's?

Not sure what a Buddhist would say actually. I think it would be something like, selves are real, sort of, but not hard and eternal, they have the nature of an illusion and are certainly transitory and conditioned.

End – acousitics is one thing, melody is another. Damn I hate this shit. Want to teach these people, not exactly cybernetics, but just the very basic principles of cognition. It's so dull and boring refighting the same broken metaphysics from Aristotle.

Ch 2 The View from Somewhere