Two of the Greatest Theological Issues of Religion

Intro.

I suspect that the following challenges are to be the greatest problems for theologians, these being to be made in the ‘image’ of God and the ‘nature’ of the spirit. I shall here take care of the answers I have acquired regarding God’s supposed perfection, and use that as a basis to reach towards my actual argument about god.

(i) God’s omni-morality

I have come to realize that some Christians believe that god is justified in initiating the method of biological evolution to formulate life because any human judgment of God’s morality is to be regarded as to be childish in the eyes of god. I am told, with the analogy of a son (or daughter) and a mother, that we human mortals are children of the lord, and that our basis for morality does not count for him. Therefore, in this case, our morality is to be ignored since God’s will is the morally right one – given the nature of his existence. Yet, the question arises:

Are theologians not simply using their own sense of morality and human-judgment to determine what is divinely moral and what is humanly moral? If our sense of morality is unjustified and childish in the eyes of the lord, then should theologians not abandon their own sense of morality and judgment and follow God’s ways? Yet this action itself requires a ‘moral’ decision, and thus the whole thing about divine morality is self-refuting.

Then, if by such philosophical reasoning, the empirical question arises: Which God do theologians follow – the Christian God, the Muslim God, Zeus, or Buddha? As Sam Harris puts it most bluntly:

“... [Christians] know exactly what it is like to be an atheist with respect to the beliefs of Muslims. Isn't it obvious that Muslims are fooling themselves? Isn't it obvious that anyone who thinks that the Koran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe has not read the book critically? Isn't it obvious that the doctrine of Islam represents a near-perfect barrier to honest inquiry? Yes, these things are obvious. Understand that the way [Christians] view Islam is precisely the way devout Muslims view Christianity. And it is the way I view all religions." (p7, "Letter to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris)

Today we see the growth in the number of Muslims in the world, the increasing amount of territory they are bound to cover, and their effects on international security – in terms of the safety of other religions. So, by theological reasoning, does this mean that the Muslim God is the right God to follow? Yet, there can be easily observed millions of Christians testifying in the credulity of their own God, tempted, it seems, to breed grounds for a holy war. The article “The New Wars of Religion” puts this most clearly:

“Back in the 20th century, most Western politicians and intellectuals (and even some clerics) assumed religion was becoming marginal to public life… In the 21st century, by contrast, religion is playing a central role. From Nigeria to Sri Lanka, from Chechnya to Baghdad, people have been slain in God’s name… Once again, one of the world’s great religions has a bloody divide (this time it is Sunnis and Shias, not Catholics and Protestants)… America would surely not have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan (and be thinking so actively of striking Iran) had 19 young Muslims not attacked New York and Washington. It does not stop there…” (The Economist, November 3rd-9th 2007, p15)

It is obvious, and utterly apparent, that humans of fundamentalist theological beliefs are very much keen on shedding blood and destroying nations, or even civilizations, all under the banner of their own God.

(ii) God’s Omnipotence

The rationalizations that Christians use (and I am unaware of the rationalizations of other religions) for God having used biological evolution to cause humans – thereby resulting in the death of millions of organic beings – is that it promotes free will, and this be his will. Perhaps, I believe, it not the question of whether free will is more important than the eternal destruction and suffering of already divinely-determined beings that matters, but rather the controversy between determinism and freedom.

In science, scholars have shown that now only are the planets deterministic (i.e. Newton), even a vast process such as biological evolution is largely easily explained (first by Charles Darwin). With fixed laws and mechanisms, life operates at a very deterministic direction, one which can be mathematically quantified and empirically tested through objective means.

All I am trying to say here is that God’s role in the fate of the universe is inversely proportional to our knowledge about the universe. That is, as history reveals, that as our knowledge increases about how the universe works, the less of a role God has in it. Surely, thus, if free will is not in actuality promoted, since it is empirically non-existent, then God can only be omnipotent but sadistic. Yet, deciding how much god is potent or moral is self-refuting since the human judgment is incredible (as decide above). It seems that since considering omnipotence is problematic, all of religion is fundamentally problematic too – since all are self-refuting arguments.

The greatest two problems for theologians

(a) The ‘nature’ of spirits

With regard to the above section on “God’s Omnipotence”, perhaps the theologian is inclined to say that free will does not lie in the chemical, physical, biological realms, but rather in the metaphysical realm – the spirit realm.

There have been many definitions of the word ‘soul’, but none of their religious versions – those involving a personal God – have sufficed to standards of the critical and systematic investigation of science. The bulk of them remain rather philosophical, but none empirical. It is interesting to note that despite all the constant grumbling of theologians and philosophers, there remains no empirical proof for them. Refutations only creates new arguments for and against the existence of souls as independent of the body, just like the infinite regress of infinite explanations or rebuttals that all remain possible – independent of their future infinite rebuttals. Exploring all the possible arguments one by one, and invalidating each one by logic and certain reasoning will not get the issue done with so easily. The object of science has given humans the capability to eliminate all this timely speculation and allowed us to derive explanations that which are limited to observable, repeatable data.

Through science, the systematic acquisition of knowledge, we have come to understand that the brain is intimately linked with our memories, behavior, personality, and belief tendencies. Examples include damage to frontal lobes resulting in loss of capacity for secondary emotions, mirror neurons fire when copying another individual’s behavior or when seeing the behavior, and TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) which alters personality when damage is done to the brain.

If the soul, as many say, is the totality of human attributes, this including the capacity to empathize and self-reflect, and if the inferior frontal cortex and superior parietal lobule are damaged – where the mirror neurons reside – and thus lose capacity to empathize, does that mean that the soul has been changed with another?

If the soul of a human resides at the very beginning of conception, or fertilization between sperm and egg, what does it mean then if the embryo splits into two and gives twins, or when two embryos fuse to become one? Does it mean that, the initial, that one soul splits into two, or in the latter, two souls have become one? (Courtesy of Sam Harris who revealed this problem in “Letter to a Christian Nation”)

What about if the soul is the result of what is born? Then what is the offspring called if it were born prematurely – is it an undeveloped soul? What if the baby were born with certain brain damage, resulting in the lack for empathy, the inability to cry and see? Does that mean it were a partial soul?

The fact is, because of the utter vagueness and metaphorical usage in most holy books, most theologians have to use their own reasoning to find out what souls exactly are. Yet again human judgment is too premature for the actuality of the metaphysical realm, and thus any reasoning is led meaningless.

(b) Humans are made in the image of God

As a derivative of the foregoing rebuttal regarding the existence of the soul as independent of the body, this section follows by questioning whether humans were made in the ‘image’ of God.

If we are eternally unable to know what the spirit or soul is, as theology predicts, then what does ‘God’ mean – in terms of being similar to humans? If God is supernatural, then God is neither chemically, nor physically, nor biologically bound to natural law. In this sense, God does not have a human body. Yet, in neurology we know that the brain produces emotions, the personality and behavior of the individual – via our understanding of how damage to certain regions of the brain affects the individual psyche. If God does not have a human body, including a human brain, how then does God feel empathy, or any other human emotion?

On the other hand, what does it mean to say that as a rebuttal to the foregoing inquiry, that the human psyche exists independently of the body, but uses it to communicate with other bodies, i.e. souls? Already we know this to be false because permanent or temporary damage to specific regions to the brain affects observable characteristics of the psyche. It seems more likely that the psyche is the brain, rather than psyche, or the soul, being outside the brain.

So if this ‘image’ concept does not apply to human mental attributes, not physical attributes, then in what way are humans made in the image of God? It remains a mystery…

Conclu.

Theology explains all metaphysical phenomena as mystery. The critical issues of the soul and the likeness in God are not only begging unempirical, circular questions, but are yet also the foundation of religion itself. All an outsider can say is that religion is full of nonsense, that we should discontinue the endorsement of such a disease – created by humankind himself.