Well, Buddhism doesn’t see it in those terms. — Wayfarer

There doesn't appear to be any one way Buddhism sees things

I did say "however that God might be conceived". The number one thing for Buddhism seems to be compassion; which consists in loving all beings. God, for the Buddhists, would thus seem to be Buddha Nature, conceived as the real nature of all beings. I don't think there is as much difference between Brahmanism and Buddhism as is often made out.

I think the underlying tension owes a lot to the insistence by Protestantism on ‘salvation by faith alone’. That is one of the major motivation for the rejection of the ‘super-natural’. But that is another topic. — Wayfarer

The notion of salvation by faith alone is not really a significant part of the point I am making at all. Of course wisdom, intelligence, responsibility and discipline, among other virtues, are all important elements in any soteriology. I am not emphasizing faith as a beginning, but feeling. If you don't feel love, that is if you do not love God and your neighbour as yourself, then you cannot be saved; it is as simple as that. Loving God and your neighbour as yourself just is salvation, as far as I can see. So, love should constitute faith. Faith without love (and wisdom, intelligence, responsibility and discipline) is blind. Salvation cannot come from blind faith.

As these purposes not actually rooted in nature herself, they can only ever be fabricated or constructed. So what kind of resonance do they have with the cosmos at large? — Wayfarer

It comes back to our different metaphysical pictures of causality.

For me, there is "nothing" until the everythingness, the vagueness, of a potential is constrained. And so that makes "purpose" fundamental. A constraint must, by definition, express some kind of natural wish or tendency. So for reality to have some definite persistent character, there must be a good reason for that state of regulation to be in place.

You instead want to argue that purpose can't be found in the self-organisation of nature. For you, the presence of purposes is thus made a problem.

The infant's world is a world of indeterminate feeling before it is a world of cognition and perception. — Janus

Does the science support that view? For a human newborn, everything is pretty indeterminate in a phenomenological sense. Even to smile takes a few months to develop.

We know in the sense of being familiar with things; that is the basis of knowing. — Janus

Sure. I said that we need to be able to recognise stuff fits to also recognise when it doesn't. And both have a characteristic feel because both result in suitable physical preparatory responses. We can feel ourselves gearing up to approach or avoid, accept or reject, attend or ignore.

And when thinking at a linguistic level, we still have to bounce our thinking off this same basic neurobiology. We consider the idea and react with a match or mismatch response.

This should be obvious from the various meta-cognitive illusions that we might experience, like deja vu. We can feel conviction even when we know there oughtn't be.

Sure, but I don't argue for that. I say that, when it comes to metaphysical views or any viewpoint which cannot be rigorously inter-subjectively corroborated, we choose the ones we find most convincing, and that being convinced is really a matter of feeling. — Janus

But how does that deal with my reply that what we feel is easily manipulated by the way some matter is presented?

Sure, the feeling of being convinced is a genuine thing. We go aha!, all the bits fit. But it is not a reliable thing. Everyone has great insights on drugs or when they are half-asleep, but then the conviction slips away in the cold light of day.

So our brain has evolved to make reliable "gut instinct" judgements about what is familiar, what is suspect. And we continue to apply that to the imagined world we conjure up in our heads through language. Yet there is a large literature on cognitive biases to show how wrong gut instinct can be.

It is a long list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

The kind of "feeling" I am referring to is the desire for truth and intellectual honesty that enables you to see where you might be indulging in "confirmation bias". — Janus

But that goal of being objective and dispassionate is about as socially constructed as it gets. Believing in it is a product of modern culture, hardly the natural human condition. It is a social habit, a taught method, not a "feeling" that we find deeply buried underneath all the usual self-righteous, self-serving, ways of thought that might be more the human norm.

Why do we keep pointing back to the Ancient Greeks as our philosophical model? Did the Greeks suddenly evolve a neurobiology that set them apart from the Persians or Egyptians in this regard? Or did they accept a method?

The essence of any religion consists in loving God, however that God might be conceived. The experience of that love is the most enriching human experience possible, in my view. — Janus

All I can say is that this means nothing to me. My alternative would be to reply that the most enriching thing would be loving life, warts and all.

Also when I say feeling is fundamental to human experience I mean that it is the calibre and kind of feeling that predominates in a human life that determines the happiness, the overall tenor, of that life — Janus

I don't deny that. As I argue, cognition involves the production of the self along with the world. Our experience of the world is really our experience of ourselves in that world. We feel where the one stops and the other starts.

But I think you are relying on a loose definition of "feeling". Neurobiology tells us that the brain has an "emotional response" to whatever passes through the eye of attention. We react to whatever matters in every way we need to react. And that includes a lot of rapid changes in arousal and physiological set which then - in sensory fashion - feel like something to "us".

But I think you are relying on a loose definition of "feeling". — apokrisis

I'm referring to feeling as it subjectively seems to us. I'm not concerned with what it might be 'objectively'.

But that goal of being objective and dispassionate is about as socially constructed as it gets. — apokrisis

I'm talking about the basic desire not to deceive ourselves; to know the truth. I take that to be a universal human quality, not in the sense that it operates in all people though.

We can feel conviction even when we know there oughtn't be. — apokrisis

We only "know there oughtn't be" based on some story or other that we tell ourselves and feel is true and correct; in other words on the basis of some other conviction. I haven't denied that we can have conflicting convictions.

Sure, the feeling of being convinced is a genuine thing. We go aha!, all the bits fit. But it is not a reliable thing. Everyone has great insights on drugs or when they are half-asleep, but then the conviction slips away in the cold light of day. — apokrisis

That's right, we can come to think our convictions are mistaken and thus all our convictions must be questioned and understood in relation to our entire experience. But this doesn't change the fact that as it is experienced all conviction is based on feeling; and that the desire for intellectual honesty and for the truth (if it is felt) is a feeling; and also that it is feeling which gives us the best guide as to whether deceive ourselves.

I mean, if we don't feel our own self-deception then who is going to feel it for us? If someone tells me that I am deceiving myself and I don't feel they are right, will I blindly follow them just on their say so, or accept some analysis that doesn't ring true to me? You might call it "romantic individualism" but there is no getting away from the fact that each of us is responsible for our own judgements, convictions and decisions, and who would want them to be dictated to us by others, in any case?

I think your attempt to objectify human experience, to make it something measurable and quantifiable, is doomed to failure. I mean what does it matter what our experience "really is", if I don't have any feeling of caring about that, or if I feel convinced that thinking we are able to 'get outside' of our experience in order to objectify it is a fool's errand? What really matters is what our experience is to us as it is experienced; what matters is what leads to heightening the felt quality of our lives, not arriving at some cold analysis of what our experience, our lives, are reducible to, or to what we take to be an objective explanation for their possibility.

The essence of any religion consists in loving God, however that God might be conceived. The experience of that love is the most enriching human experience possible, in my view. — Janus


All I can say is that this means nothing to me. My alternative would be to reply that the most enriching thing would be loving life, warts and all. — apokrisis

And my reply to would be that for you loving God then consists in "loving life warts and all". Life warts and all is your God; and I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that. We all have our own Gods; the important thing is to love something greater than ourselves.

If we care about something greater than ourselves then we have religion. The etymology of religion has been traced to the "Latin 'religio' ‘obligation, bond, reverence’, perhaps based on Latin religare ‘to bind’" *. We are bound to life and to others when we care, when we feel obligation, responsibility, when we feel reverence; if we don't care, if we don't have these feelings, then we are really nothing; our lives are a nihilistic, atheistic nothingness no matter how immense our intellectual understanding might be.

.* quoted from Online Etymology Dictionary

What really matters is what our experience is to us as it is experienced; what matters is what leads to heightening the felt quality of our lives, not arriving at some cold analysis of what our experience, our lives, are reducible to, or to what we take to be an objective explanation for their possibility. — Janus

I come across people who are passionately convinced about all sorts of things all the time - UFOs, gun ownership, Hollywood bearding conspiracies, you name it. If you think that the subjectivity of unanalysed "feelings" is the answer, and that objective analysis is not about a methodology for arriving at what is honest and truthful, then there is nothing more to discuss.

You argue according to your strength of conviction, I instead believe conviction arises once doubt lies demonstrably exhausted for all practical purposes. There is no common ground if you are to be believed.

Life warts and all is your God; — Janus

Except it is no sort of God. It is Nature. Please call it that. Let's not pretend to agree on what we fundamentally don't.

I come across people who are passionately convinced about all sorts of things all the time - UFOs, gun ownership, Hollywood bearding conspiracies, you name it. — apokrisis

Are they really passionately convinced or are they just neurotically protective of beliefs they are attached to for some obscure reason?

You argue according to your strength of conviction, I instead believe conviction arises once doubt lies demonstrably exhausted for all practical purposes. There is no common ground if you are to be believed. — apokrisis

For me my convictions represent what I believe I have the least reason to doubt in the light of the whole of my experience as I presently understand it. No doubt there is room for improvement, and I will come to find that some of my convictions are based on neurotic attachments. I pray my feelings allow the intellectual honesty to see my own self-deceptions. :smile:

Except it is no sort of God. It is Nature. Please call it that. Let's not pretend to agree on what we fundamentally don't. — apokrisis

Spinoza said "deus sive natura", "God or nature". I tend to think the same. Perhaps we don't fundamentally agree: but do you at least acknowledge that it is important to love something greater than ourselves?

Are they really or are they just protecting some belief they are attached to? — Janus

So where would that leave you and your true and honest subjective convictions? How could you deny them theirs?

Spinoza said "deus sive natura", "God or nature". I tend to think the same. Perhaps we don't fundamentally agree: but do you at least acknowledge that it is important to love something greater than ourselves? — Janus

Define God. Define love. Definitions will uncover your ontic commitments - to the degree that something definite stands behind the use of the terms.

I wouldn't myself talk about love as if it were something ontically foundation. I simply say that central to flourishing is not hating the world as it naturally is.

Likewise I wouldn't talk about it as being higher - transcendent. Rather I am talking about embracing it as being essentially part of "myself" - immanent. To reject nature - as it actually is - would be misguided.

So I don't think we can agree here. You want to believe an ontology that seems opposite in every important respect.

So where would that leave you and your true and honest subjective convictions? How could you deny them theirs? — apokrisis

I have no doubt we all protect some attachments or other. The truth and honesty of other's convictions are their affair, not mine, unless they try to shove them down my throat.

Define God. Define love. Definitions will uncover your ontic commitments — apokrisis

God is what we conceive to be greater than ourselves. Love is the emotion of caring about that greatness. It could be very different things for different people; which is only right insofar as it is in accordance with the nature of diversity.

I simply say that central to flourishing is not hating the world as it naturally is. — apokrisis

Not hating something is the first step; but it is not the same as loving it.

Likewise I wouldn't talk about it as being higher - transcendent. Rather I am talking about embracing it as being essentially part of "myself" - immanent. To reject nature - as it actually is - would be misguided. — apokrisis

I don't think in terms of 'transcendence' either if by that is meant something substantive. I think in terms of immanence; of what is within us. In no way do I condone rejecting nature or science as the study of nature; so I'm not sure from where you are getting this impression.

I can't think of any way in which my ontology differs significantly from yours, other than that I might be more inclined to accept the idea of an immanent, in-finite intelligence. Such a notion leaves the whole of science untouched, in my view. That is why some of the great scientists can also be theists. Having a sensible religious faith could not preclude anyone from doing science at any level.