Namaste Operacast,
Your viewpoint is intriguing, I currently see a difference with what I said and your 'theoretical' (potential?) proof there is no G!d vs. proof. How could one be a theist if G!d were able to be disproved in their mind? I need help on that one, I can't wrap my mind around it. Not intending any condescending tone.
Actually, I don't really know of anyone else who arrived at belief the way I did. It's possible a few others have, but I don't know of any offhand, personally. This is a rather extensive account, and I hope it doesn't derail this thread. But you've asked an honest question and it deserves an honest answer.
I began as an agnostic and a compulsive reader. There were times in my life I almost never had a book out of my hand. I'd read anything/everything. Simply in devouring whatever literature, fiction, poetry, drama, history, philosophy, etc., I could, I became interested -- strictly as a hobby -- in political/social/cultural history through the ages. I also became an admirer of Stephen Jay Gould and extremely curious about the social/cultural implications of evolution for our own species. Not so much the cultural impact of the idea of evolution but the mechanics of evolution itself as it had evidently impacted on our own species across the eons. Again and again, it seemed to me that the kinds of crisis pressures that Gould writes about, involving the mechanics of quick, discrete changes in various species rather than the (up-to-then) traditional "gradualism" model scientifically understood and accepted in the wake of writings by Darwin and Wallace, could be seen in humanity's cultural history alongside its biological history. Isn't it artificial and misleading to separate cultural trends from biological instinct? We're all still animals, after all.
Socialization seems the key to what has made homo sapiens survive so long, IMO. And socialization depends on ever more intricate social/cultural structures that help knit the human community together: first villages, then towns, then counties, then states, then countries, then alliances -- until one has the virtual global village we have today. The glue that keeps any social harmony/socialization in play in the midst of such huge structures is some modicum of consideration for the "other" -- seeing oneself in the "other" -- affirming codependent responsibility for each other. Empathy, in other words. After all, the smaller -- psychologically -- the global village is, the more the sufferings of others will eventually impact on oneself. This means that any cultural breakthrough that more greatly sensitizes everyone's consciousness of the call to empathy for/with all others constitutes likewise a step forward in our behavioral evolution, similar to the crisis pressures that are outlined in Gould that precipitate discrete changes in a number of various other species.
So I became fascinated with any historic breakthroughs throughout human history that helped spark discrete and increased awareness of and consciousness for the human claims of individuals outside oneself. These seemed part and parcel of our natural evolution and might even indicate something intrinsic in nature itself. Imagine my frustration when I ascertained that no great breakthroughs in human/cultural ethics/empathy seemed tied to any innovating agnostics or atheists. Sure, there were plenty of courageous and generous social reformers who were both throughout history. But in their ethics, powerful and altruistic as they sometimes were, they never applied an original ethical insight, instead applying -- with fervor, yes -- culturally familiar, if neglected, insights from previous "ethicists".
Such was not always the case with similarly countercultural "ethics reformers" among the believers. Some of those would instead introduce radically new ideas compelling their brethren to reconceive from scratch what the obligations of being a thriving and decent and caring human being really were. This is no random pattern, it seems. It reappears throughout the written record, and one must suppose it typifies much of unwritten human history before that as well.
Even more culturally uncanny is the fact that these radically countercultural reformers frequently buck the prevailing conception of deity of the time as well, so they're not accidental theists out of any "follow-the-leader" psychology of the time. Instead, being as countercultural in their brand of theism as in their ethics, they risk their own necks intimating a gut understanding of a deity radically different from -- and frequently more tolerant than -- the one their contemporary peers imagine. Such breakthroughs are thus coming from innovators who are dual innovators, innovators both in their countercultural brand of theism and in their countercultural brand of social ethics. The impression left is of an entire -- and altogether new -- outlook covering both areas and informed by one and the same revelation.
As an erstwhile agnostic, it was disappointing to me to find that the most genuine innovative skeptics who were culturally/socially broadminded and caring were either innovators, for their time, in their individual way of nonbelief, or innovators, for their time, in their individual way of empathic social ethics. Never innovators in both. In fact, the earliest known skeptical philosophy of all is a pure and unequivocal atheism first found in ancient India ca. 600 B.C.E.: Lokayata. Lokayata, frustratingly, is indeed a socially and culturally innovative "ethical" philosophy as well as the first known innovative philosophy of total unbelief; but "ethically", it's a philosophy calling on each individual to look out only for oneself and pro-actively ignore one's neighbor!
Taking stock of all these patterns, I've provisionally concluded that a visceral awareness of deity may be key to the essential evolutionary social/cultural breakthroughs that continually help us to continue to thrive together as a species who must look out for each other and not just oneself if we are to survive in the long term at all. The closer we look out for each other, the more we progress and thrive. The more we neglect such ethical demands, the more we may put all of ourselves at peril throughout the globe.
The human equivalent of the crisis pressures Gould outlines that precipitate discrete steps forward for a species may be the countercultural insights of the Buddhas, the Christs, etc., who have turned whole cultures around time after time throughout time. If so, personal countercultural insights into deity may be inseparable from human evolution, no matter the occasional risk of personal suffering to the individual who is actually courageous and altruistic enough to introduce such new ideas to her/his peers in the first place. This makes all the more horrible and inexcusable the behavior of some later followers who will sometimes pervert such enlightened teachings into a stick used for assaulting their "enemies". At the same time, the initial and consistent cultural success of the original innovators in "mainstreaming" their broadminded ethical innovations would seem to suggest the distinct probability that some form of deity, at least, is perfectly real.
This is a long way to get to your question, yes. But the answer to your question is that if there were to be found, at any point either in the ancient past or in the present or in the future, an entirely countercultural figure who would introduce from scratch a radical unprecedented form of atheism within an entirely pious and isolated community, like, say, within a hitherto theocratic culture on an isolated island out in the Pacific, and who did so in the same breath with an equally radical and unimaginable kind of altruistic ethics of a sort none of us can yet conceive of, and if that brand of combined atheism and radical altruism took root throughout that isolated community with total success and was entirely "mainstreamed" as a result, then I would see reason to suppose that a visceral engagement with deity is not essential to our successful social/cultural development after all. Hence, the supposition that some form of deity is probably real as well could also be scrapped. But after a lifetime of reading, I've yet to find such an innovator. If I do, I'd accept a return to my previous skepticism. But there doesn't seem to be any such figure (so far
.
Cheers,
Operacast
