Superpositioned rationality and faith - Can I have my cake and eat it too?
The struggle goes on. And on... sleep... Posted elsewhere just now: 'Can I have my cake and eat it? Can faith and rationality; strong, fierce, ruthless, unstinting, blind, paring, unsparing rationality, the lathe of heaven, coexist? Be in superposition?
It [see below] echoes my heart remarkably actually, as I said to another [elsew]here, only last night, who insists that Christian metaphor is literal, God is my amniotic fluid on out, as He is for each of the infinity of His creations. Transcendently immanent.
God tells us to invoke Him as Father as that will work. I have to agree.'
This was in response to their posting
Ploughing upstream (Have you ever done that? Literally walked up a river? Amazing): What precipitated this question was getting to chapter 10, Dependent Church, in Steve Chalke's 2006 Intelligent Church (I rate him and Oasis as the gold standard and I'm catching up on his oeuvre). He invokes Bill Withers' '72 classic 'Lean on Me'; that God calls us to depend on Him, 'Be still and know that I am God'. As another Bill, Hybels, said, authentic Christianity is not rote doctrine and uniform marching, not even humanitarian service to the less fortunate, 'It is a walk, a supernatural walk with a living, dynamic, communicating God'. Chalke: 'It is no accident that Jesus teaches us to address the creator of the universe as 'our Father''. Hence my comment to that effect above. Chalke goes on to synergize competency, dependency, mission, activism, service, integrity, credibility. Dependency on and intimacy with God being perichoretic with mission. So pray about it. About everything. As Phil Wall's 'contemplative activists'.
So far so good. So very good. So orthodox, so orthoprax.
But the orthodoxy continues. Praying in the face of the fact that God's will is not done on Earth as it is in heaven, what's going on? Evil. Nigh on dualist evil, 'the picture of spiritual conflict [the NT] paints can only be fully understood in terms of the drama between two kingdoms: that of God and that of Satan'. He quotes Greg Boyd, who is a runaway dualist to the point of Satan the eternal meta-cosmic demiurge. He orthodoxly notes Jesus' dealings with and triumph over Satan the Devil. The war is won but skirmishes continue. Like the Pacific War, from Guadalcanal victory was assured, two and a half years of murderous slog later. Lewis' metaphors are rolled out 'This universe is at war. But it is . . . a civil war, a rebellion, in that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by a rebel.'
Highly problematic to most post/modern minds.
Chalke gives the liberal, deconstructionist view which we all embrace; that human systems synergize our weaknesses as well as our strengths. He endorses that. And the literal demonic. As 'intelligent'. As intelligent people do here.
So, in approaching my primary superposition, of faith and reason, faith orthogonal to and in tension with reason, a la Kierkegaard, requiring a leap from the anxious nausea, I find other superposition, layers of it. Not only is the world completely, solely, utterly natural, it is perfused in the supernatural. Worse, a whole supernatural moral ecology. And that not only are we expected to pray dependently therapeutically, as good little Rogerians whether God's there or not, we're orthodoxly expected to pray in literal battle with sentient dark forces and it makes an external difference. The 'modern' mantra is that we can't bend God's will to ours. Yet if we had faith, mountains would move. The sick would rise.
Superposition that! No mountains move. The sick never rise. But we must pray that they do. In the OT God changes His mind on catastrophic courses of action due to prayer. In the New Jesus instructed the disciples to pray with persistence for what they wanted and that they would get it. Neither of those modes, regimens is what we experience. And the first is pure fantasy. The second was a dispensation for the first circle. Is my recurring rationalization.
Chalke goes on however to make that second current. Or did in 2006.
The concept of superpositioning now has a foothold, a beachhead on me. Starting nearly a year ago in finally accepting that Jesus was concurrently both God - not 'just' divine - and man. In self-caused nature that is nonetheless created. Those paradoxes I can manage. Well manage more than the others. Evil in human systems is obvious, in our individual brokenness too. But as I must invoke God as Father and Brother and Friend(s), Sar'nt, Shrink, must I conduct myself, pray as if I'm in a war with personally malevolent multidimensional aliens and that my prayers can make a difference in that and other externals apart from though me?
Sorry! This all looks ridiculous now. Not that anyone got this far I hope! Still we can always go back to shrouded popes. Ah well, here goes nothing.
It [see below] echoes my heart remarkably actually, as I said to another [elsew]here, only last night, who insists that Christian metaphor is literal, God is my amniotic fluid on out, as He is for each of the infinity of His creations. Transcendently immanent.
God tells us to invoke Him as Father as that will work. I have to agree.'
This was in response to their posting
from Wittgenstein’s notebooks that he kept during his service in WWI. You see the final form of these thoughts in the Tractatus:
What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect this with the comparison of God to a father.
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.
I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless.
I can only make myself independent of the world – and so in a certain sense master it – by renouncing any influence on happenings.
To believe in a God means to understand the meaning of life.
To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.
To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.
The world is given me, i.e. my will enters the world completely from the outside as into something that is already there.
(As for what my will is, I don’t know yet.)
However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and what we are dependent on we can call God.
In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: The world – which is independent of our will.
I can make myself independent of fate.
There are two godheads: the world and my independent I.
… When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with Something. But what is this? Is it the world?
Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.
Ploughing upstream (Have you ever done that? Literally walked up a river? Amazing): What precipitated this question was getting to chapter 10, Dependent Church, in Steve Chalke's 2006 Intelligent Church (I rate him and Oasis as the gold standard and I'm catching up on his oeuvre). He invokes Bill Withers' '72 classic 'Lean on Me'; that God calls us to depend on Him, 'Be still and know that I am God'. As another Bill, Hybels, said, authentic Christianity is not rote doctrine and uniform marching, not even humanitarian service to the less fortunate, 'It is a walk, a supernatural walk with a living, dynamic, communicating God'. Chalke: 'It is no accident that Jesus teaches us to address the creator of the universe as 'our Father''. Hence my comment to that effect above. Chalke goes on to synergize competency, dependency, mission, activism, service, integrity, credibility. Dependency on and intimacy with God being perichoretic with mission. So pray about it. About everything. As Phil Wall's 'contemplative activists'.
So far so good. So very good. So orthodox, so orthoprax.
But the orthodoxy continues. Praying in the face of the fact that God's will is not done on Earth as it is in heaven, what's going on? Evil. Nigh on dualist evil, 'the picture of spiritual conflict [the NT] paints can only be fully understood in terms of the drama between two kingdoms: that of God and that of Satan'. He quotes Greg Boyd, who is a runaway dualist to the point of Satan the eternal meta-cosmic demiurge. He orthodoxly notes Jesus' dealings with and triumph over Satan the Devil. The war is won but skirmishes continue. Like the Pacific War, from Guadalcanal victory was assured, two and a half years of murderous slog later. Lewis' metaphors are rolled out 'This universe is at war. But it is . . . a civil war, a rebellion, in that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by a rebel.'
Highly problematic to most post/modern minds.
Chalke gives the liberal, deconstructionist view which we all embrace; that human systems synergize our weaknesses as well as our strengths. He endorses that. And the literal demonic. As 'intelligent'. As intelligent people do here.
So, in approaching my primary superposition, of faith and reason, faith orthogonal to and in tension with reason, a la Kierkegaard, requiring a leap from the anxious nausea, I find other superposition, layers of it. Not only is the world completely, solely, utterly natural, it is perfused in the supernatural. Worse, a whole supernatural moral ecology. And that not only are we expected to pray dependently therapeutically, as good little Rogerians whether God's there or not, we're orthodoxly expected to pray in literal battle with sentient dark forces and it makes an external difference. The 'modern' mantra is that we can't bend God's will to ours. Yet if we had faith, mountains would move. The sick would rise.
Superposition that! No mountains move. The sick never rise. But we must pray that they do. In the OT God changes His mind on catastrophic courses of action due to prayer. In the New Jesus instructed the disciples to pray with persistence for what they wanted and that they would get it. Neither of those modes, regimens is what we experience. And the first is pure fantasy. The second was a dispensation for the first circle. Is my recurring rationalization.
Chalke goes on however to make that second current. Or did in 2006.
The concept of superpositioning now has a foothold, a beachhead on me. Starting nearly a year ago in finally accepting that Jesus was concurrently both God - not 'just' divine - and man. In self-caused nature that is nonetheless created. Those paradoxes I can manage. Well manage more than the others. Evil in human systems is obvious, in our individual brokenness too. But as I must invoke God as Father and Brother and Friend(s), Sar'nt, Shrink, must I conduct myself, pray as if I'm in a war with personally malevolent multidimensional aliens and that my prayers can make a difference in that and other externals apart from though me?
Sorry! This all looks ridiculous now. Not that anyone got this far I hope! Still we can always go back to shrouded popes. Ah well, here goes nothing.

Comments
I read it.
I've spent quite a few years now working with murderers, rapists and abusers amongst others. I like them. I, of course, show them understanding and acceptance`. I pray for them and tell them God is already in them and they are already in God (Richard Rohr).
I've even, in recent times, begun trying to offer myself a similar level of understanding and forgiveness. Which is nice. I quite like myself, too.
Old Ludwig mellowed. I recently finished Ray Monk's wonderful biography of him. Having been so harsh for years, wanting to kill himself, I think his final 'Tell them I've had a wonderful life' is plausible and sincere.
I am increasingly conscious of change in myself and others, and of connections, inter-relatedness. I look for the ways the boundaries of the individual are perfused by everything that flows. I try to see not just God, but myself, too, in the verb not the noun, in the process and the entanglement. And to have fun with all this. After all, what does it matter? It matters more than anything, so we must be relaxed and loose about it.
When I started at the hospital I wondered if I would find anyone I couldn't like; people some might consider evil. I haven't, so far. I don't feel I'm in a war with malevolent aliens. I think the war is between love and fear.
@Martin54 Forget the personally malevolent multidimensional aliens, they're just a fiction we create to absolve God of his responsibility.
I am motivated to have a look at Wittgenstein too, what a beautiful extract!
I don't struggle with doubt. I think that is a product of my salvific conversion experience. I think my certainty was gifted me because without it, my despair was likely to destroy me. (This was 20 years ago, I am good now because I live with this certainty in my heart).
I'm only an engineer, and I often end up trying to understand obsolete systems no-one knows anything about about (currently - fecked church boilers) by messing with inputs and outputs and trying to find out what is going on inside the black box. So - turn rationality off - and open the door to all kinds of evil and abuse in the name of faith. Try to depend on rationality alone - and open the door to all kinds of evil and abuse in the name of not-faith. If the latter seems unlikely (hey, I read the Guardian too) you're not using a long enough pair of Stillsons to close off that ancient, crusty old 'faith' cock
History (remember, I'm only an engineer) seems to have provided plenty of suggestions that the pair of inputs you hope might be both employed, must be employed.
It's almost like that was the idea; but we lost the instructions or they're on a 5 1/4 floppy or something.
So would being a millionaire aristocrat with the sexual capacity of a rutting rhino, as Blackadder pointed out, but, ah, well.
Be careful what you wish for.
That is kind of where I am at instinctively, but I intend to think this through.
Yeahhhhh. But that's the problem. BTW @mark_in_manchester, absa-fackin-lootely brilliant.
Yes, I've often pondered the out of control nature of these things. I suppose I used to have faith, and now I don't. I don't think this is a rational process, more something to do with emotional identification, which I don't control.
Which Christianity though?
The "everyone is heading for Hell but believe the right thing and 'Make a Commitment' and you're fine" version I used to try to believe (and undefined deities forgive me, persuade others of) makes no rational sense at all.
Even forgetting about that one (would that!) I can't make sense of any of them now.
That feels arse about face. It's such a preposterous claim on the face of it that it needs to be a conclusion from a whole load of rationalising, not a starting point.
As I just hinted on the other thread, I think doubt is a healthy ingredient of faith, not something that would ideally be overcome.
I don't see how one can get to the supernatural via reason. I know some people go, "I don't know how it all works, therefore God". That seems to jump over a big gap, for me. But I think it's OK that it's non-rational, so are most things.
This seems to be a good moment to throw in one of those one-liners that Ursula Le Guin seems to have been able to churn out on a regular and arresting basis:
(Vaster than Empires and more slow)
You’re very kind. If you know anyone good with these, perhaps you could let me know
You can't always have what you want.
Indeed. It's integral to it. Rational thought however, depends on rational assumptions.
But how is it relevant to the post I made and you quoted ?
Presumably these same guys, but not as a charity...
Assuming you seriously don't see it.
You posted that sometimes "a simple faith is to be desired"
My thought was "be that as it may, that isn't what most people have. And it's not like you can just make that happen"
Now I am a big comedy fan, leaning particularly to Monty Python, Blackadder, Red Dwarf and so on and so forth. I was reminded (for such happens when a thought wonders through a mind in search of something to connect with*) of an exchange between Mr Blackadder and Sodoff Baldrick
"Something wrong Mr B?"
"Something's always wrong Baldrick. The fact I'm not a millionaire aristocrat with the sexual capacity of a rutting rhino is a constant niggle. But today something's even wronger"
So I referenced it as a more interesting (to me anyway) way of saying that just because something may be desired, it doesn't mean it is available.
*I forgot to cite Hitchhiker's.
What does 'intended as a work of fiction' really mean? I'd put Ruth, Job and Jonah down as deliberate works of fiction for a start.
What about petitionary prayer that doesn't change the law of physics?
I agree that the idea of the world as a machine, with God reaching into the mechanism everyone now and again to tinker, is untenable. As is the older but better idea of the world as God's garden.
But I find it harder to dismiss the idea of the world as a story authored by God. To steal someone's old analogy, why did Sherlock Holmes fall over the Reichenbach Falls? One answer: Moriarty pushed him. Another answer: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got so sick of the character he decided to kill him off.
What if Watson prayed for the safety of his friend, and Conan Doyle decided that a world where Watson's prayer was answered was preferable and rewrote the book? How could any of the characters tell the difference? What laws of physics were changed?
Thanks Martin. I am still clutching at straws, hoping I don't have to pay someone to sort this out. Every time our church engages people, we get shafted.
This passed without comment, and I wanted to affirm it. It is how it felt for me when I lost my faith, and there was an emotional identification to it when it came back - thought what 'allowed' me to assume that identification, was the rational understanding that everyone who was stating their position as entirely rational, were equally only emotional. That sounds like I'm trying to be clever, but I'm not (which is another way of saying, I'm not failing to be so, either
For many years now all I have ever prayed for is that people have strength and/or courage, or that I have the strength & courage to be a good friend to them. I also pray for the presence of God as a friend to turn to for spiritual strength. Petitionary prayer as such doesn't seem rational to me. There are still wars, pestilence and bad neighbours. Whilst I express gratitude in general, I don't thank God as such, for then I will have to curse God when things go wrong - and fortune always sways from good to bad and back again.
I don't like the idea of the world as a story authored by God either. Surely he opened the book for us to write the story.
The rationality/emotional debate is interesting because this doesn’t feel like an emotional response to me. Being bipolar, emotional responses are a big feature of my life; I spend most of my time in a low manic state with occasional swings to mania or depression. Yet my faith is cool and calming in the ups and downs of my world, it is the one constant just as God was the one constant at my lowest time. I see it as a rational response born from experience. Of course, others might consider it a protective psychological reaction - but I can only say how I experience it.
I don't want to be encouraged to think this world is not real, and I don't like to think of God as being like a human author, who might set up a distressing story for their characters then get bored and wander off without writing another word. But Watson's prayer has got my attention.
I think authors often reflect on their characters and are moved by them. They realise that their original idea of what choices they will make no longer ring true, and they adjust the plot to enable their characters to be more convincingly human.
So an idea, not a person, just an idea about how Watson might pray affects an author, and changes a plot.
I think we are too narrowly focused on the idea that humans have lives and make choices and fail to see that the Raft of the Medusa was an actor in the world, and the poetry of Michael Leunig is, and so is every film and book, and to an extent each gif and tweet and joke and opinion shared.
We can think of the life of God as having its being in the memes and stories that not only flow through history, but flow through each of us, set up home for a while, get modified, and pass on to others. We can even think of ourselves as existing in a strangely dispersed way, in the thoughts and memories and feelings of everyone who knows us. I experienced a little electrochemical pleasure at reading your name and having some memories triggered. Though we have never met, you live in me in a way that is perfectly real.
Perhaps it’s a Matthew 18:3 vs 1 Corinthians 13:11 confusion.
We think that child-likeness is only necessary for conversion and after that, we should put it behind us and embrace complexity, strong coffee and other sophisticated grownup things.
We may even look back and smile to ourselves at how naive, how embarrassingly zealous we were once.
It is impossible to remain a child physically, but I do miss those younger days when I didn’t have any personal history to regret and I would see tomorrow as full of possibilities instead of just more of the same.
Maybe that is what He meant by childlike. Yes we have to do all the normal adult juggling, but we are not entangled by it.
And like small children, we see some of the things adults do as strange and silly and we’re not afraid to say so. We are in the world, but not of it. (The world’s not going to like that, quick, pass me an espresso and a Gauloise; I need to blend in)
That sounds very sensible. But my sense is that Christianity is asking to be more than a supplement to our rational worldview. That there is a thread therein that calls us to give up everything, rationality and all, to gain the pearl of great price.
Everything that happens happens by the rules of the game which represent the laws of nature. If the gamemaster fudges a die roll or uses a fate game mechanic to change it he only changes it to something else that could have happened without violating the rules.
The problem is that if the analogy is overstretched then we end up with a world powered by Narrativium - the Discworld, not our real Roundworld.
The other problem is some of us struggle to discern that there is a gamemaster.
It's interesting that the pushback is about the feeling that using storytelling as a metaphor diminishes our agency, our "realness".
I'm not nearly as sure about that as most people seem to be.
@Martin54 was talking above about paradoxes, opposites held in tension - Jesus is God and a man, not just divine and human, was his example.
Maybe this is another. God as author, above time and space, sees the whole narrative arc as one, outside our time. The story is on his computer, and he edits it as he sees fit. But we, his characters, only perceive the inside. We only see our part of the narrative, we don't see the ending, we can't remember the beginning.
But both these views are true and real. Our choices are at once both wholly ours, and wholly God's. The story is wholly ours, and wholly God's.
The risk here, which is where people who've thought this before run into trouble, is that we've stripped away all the excuses that we've carefully created to absolve God. We've stripped away the idea of the laws of physics as an excuse (the laws of the game, the die role). We've stripped away the idea of human choices as an excuse (for at God's level, he is the author). We've stripped away the psychotic aliens as an excuse (for even Satan can be at most another character).
And yet we want to hold onto another paradox: that God is love, and we live in a world with fear, hate and pain.
But I'm wary of too much smugness as well, because compared to his life, or anyone of his time, my life has been so devoid of suckiness it's not funny
Absolutely @caroline444, the metaphor of God as author is only that. It cannot be taken literally in the light of eternity, which blows away once-upon-a-time and the superfluous non-sense of omnitemporality. Even so, your lovely countering metaphor is similarly obliterated by the fact of eternity. There is no book, there is no story. Except God grounds being and stuff happens now, from forever gone. He ineffably yearns in to situations as the ultimate Rogerian - person-centred - therapist, in the transcendent He does so face to face.
Problem is that extreme Calvinist "suckiness" includes that God will torture nearly everyone I love for all eternity in the most extreme agony imaginable. Love him? I'd have to be a psychopath.
They are. If you're not a fly. If you are, then no, they're everything that sucks. Literally.