If it is my intention to be disrespectful, I will most likely state this explicity.
One of the basic tennets of Christianity is that Jesus is a personal God, who listens to, interacts with, and generally befriends all the faithful. This gives many Christians the impression that they know Jesus, that they know whats on his mind, and what his intentions are. However, this presents a very interesting dilemma, which starts by asking the questions "So just who is this Jesus guy, anyway?"
This is a question that any Christian would be thrilled to answer at great length. There is plenty of recommended reading and hours of waxing ecstatic, and general good moods and spirits during the whole process. You will hear how he was the perfect man, the one man who was born and died without sin, how he sacrificed his life for humanity, and how he seems to have a personal interest in the outcome of professional sporting events.
However, things get a bit trickier when you ask "which church should I go to?" There are many different churches which practice different kinds of worship. There are Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, Calvanists, and scores of others. This reveals a bit of a problem. Christianity is a monothesistic religion, with only one God. So how did we suddenly get several different groups, and what does all this mean about Jesus?
We can apply this to specific issues as well. For example, how does Jesus feel about abortion? We don't _really_ know, because the bible was written before it became a popular issue. There is in fact no quote that literally reads "abortion is wrong," partly because the bible was not written in English, and partly because the connotation for the word "abortion" had not been developed yet. However, most Christians seem to believe that Jesus is not a fan of abortion. Some have washed their hands of the matter, admitting that they aren't sure. And an unfortunate few (extremist) have even taken it upon themselves to murder the doctors who run such clinics. Again, the one religion with the one God has given us three very different answers to one question.
Allow me to bring up another example before I get to the point. There is an often cited quote by Bailey Smith of the Souther Baptist Convention, which is quoted here:
"It is interesting at great political rallies how you have a Protestant to pray and a Catholic to pray, and then you have a Jew to pray. With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew. For how in the world can God hear the prayer of a man who says that Jesus Christ is not the true Messiah? It is blasphemy."--Bailey Smith, president, Southern Baptist Convention, Aug. 22, 1980.
Now an interesting thing happened in response to this statement, a majority of Christians condemned this statement as silly and disrespectful. Nobody that I have personally spoken to has shared the sentiment of Bailey Smith, which is fortunate. I doubt if I would get along well with such a person, or anyone like him.
The point that I have been dancing around is that there is no one answer to "who is Jesus?" He is not here to represent himself today, and the Bible is very inadequate at addressing details such as "does Jesus prefer Coke or Pepsi." Silliness aside, this is a big problem, one that has plagued the Christian Church, since the very beginning.
Now, I can expand this to the broader issue of God, to collectively include the big three religions, plus all the others. There are two major groups of Muslims, the Sunnis and the Shiites; three if you count the Kurds. There are several smaller divides amongst the Jews. And there are more Christian churches than I can count.
And each and every group has a different image, a different idea of God. Some see him as all merciful, some see him as all merciful... to a few people, and some see him as a general prick to everyone but themselves.
I need not belabor the point that, somewhere we lost touch. We have more variations of the “one God” than we know what to do with.
And to anyone who is sure that their image of God is more correct than anyone else's, I make the obvious demand “prove it!” God has not been on Earth, to speak with us personally, in a looooong time. Conveniently, well before any of us were alive. However, whether or not he does exist, and did come to Earth at some point in the past, and whether or not he did leave a message, that does not do anything to help us with the current problem.
The current problem is that between the noise generated by hundreds of thousands of pastors, rabis, and holy men, we have almost certainly lost touch with God. And he is not here with us, in any verifiable, universal way. Well, maybe he is speaking with a voice in some people's head, but for whatever reason, there are no voices in my head, except of course for my own.
So, what can we possibly do with no certain knowledge of God?
I propose that we have some philosophical fun with the issue.
Fair warning, I might get mathy here in a minute. Ya, thats right, I am applying mathematical analogies to the concept of God. Jesus, Allah and Yahweh are about to become vectors in the broader, higher dimensional space of divine possibility. (Note: I will try to keep the predicate calculus to a minimum)
I am going to start by assuming that we know nothing. There might be no God, there might be one God, there might be several Gods, there might be infinitely many Gods. They/it might be good, bad, indifferent. Maybe they listen to the same kind of music that you do, maybe it doesn't. Actually, the concept of a God might be too limiting, maybe there are many other factors, components, or agents at work, the bounds of imagination are limitless. Perhaps there is a collective force that is actually composed of many smaller atomic components. So the word “God” really must be removed from this discussion, since it will only reinforce connotations and old assumptions. We must break free, and open up a broader world of possibility. So, in order to broaden this even further I would like to propose that the world of the supernatural, the divine, is composed of unknown, unexplained and unspecified things that I will simply refer to as an external. I have defined externals as a very broad set of possible things that may or may not exist. Actually, it is irrelevant if they exist or not, we can discuss and model them anyway. Strictly speaking, the group of externals is a superset of Gods. I will discuss them from a group theory standpoint at another time.
Incidentally, by taking a completely universal starting point, I can be 100% sure that the truth lies somewhere within our search space. This was my goal with the first step, now we can begin to layout a framework for discussing externals in a coherent and rational way.
Now, I should probably take a moment to explain some of these mathematical terms. A “search space” is a list of all possible answers to a problem, which can be narrowed down until a specific solution can be found. So if you think of an island with buried treasure, initially, the whole island is the search space. However, as your trusty minions test solutions, err...dig holes, you can systematically eliminate sections of the search space... I mean island... narrowing it down until you find the goal: the optimal solution, err uh... treasure.
Now, with the island example, I can break the island up into a grid of columns and rows. Of course, on earth we would call these longitude and latitude, or if you prefer, GPS coordinates. However, for a simple grid, I would just use Cartesian coordinates, so we don't have to worry about goofy things like the spherical topology of the earth, and the difference between polar and rectangular coordinates. Its easy if each point is just an X and a Y.
Now, treasure island may seem to be miles removed from discussions of the supernatural, but let me show you how this can in fact be relevant. Lets bring Jesus back into the picture, and lets ask how merciful Jesus is. Some would say he is very merciful, some not so much. One of my friends (who shall be referred to as A1) has explained a pretty merciful version of Jesus, but a pastor (B1) who I once spoke to described him as being much less merciful, and lastly you have Bailey Smith (C1), who seems convinced that Jesus is a prick. Now I can map these three descriptions of Jesus on a piece of graph paper as follows.
So now we can see how different people's ideas of Jesus compare, at least in a somewhat qualitative way. We will work on making this more quantitative in a bit, but for the moment the methods are more important than the actual figures.
Right now my “divine treasure map” is a bit one dimensional, and I made this whole big mess about multi-dimensionality, so I had better add another dimension. Maybe as another metric, we can put a measure of Jesus's influence on day to day life. Again, I have heard different opinions about how active a role God plays in the normal events of someone's life. I have heard that God stays pretty much out of our business, allowing us to do our own thing (typically citing free will). Other have insisted that God actually came down and changed traffic lights for them. So now we can draw a second axis.
Now things start to get fun, because we can start to look at two dimensions at once. Once we have multiple dimensions, or if you prefer, characteristics, we can start to generate correlations... Maybe more merciful models of Jesus are also the less active ones? Maybe a deist version of Jesus is the most merciful of all? Maybe the most active Jesus isn't very nice at all, causing things like floods? You may cringe at a statement like this last one, but if you recall this is about people's impressions of Jesus, not the actual being. And some of the more extreme evangelicals have said that Katrina was punishment for gay pride events in New Orleans; some have said that 9/11 was punishment for pagans, feminists, and atheists.
Of course, these lines are made up. I have not come up with a proper way of measuring these characteristics of peoples beliefs, it isn't as easy measuring their heads in the style of phrenology, there is no clear quantitative measure for any thoughts at all. One could gather information about this using fuzzier methods, and I would highly encourage someone to do so, but I don't actually care to do this polling. Maybe if I had a couple million sitting around I would enlist Gallup to do some research for me.
The goal of this example is to show possible interdependence between characteristics of an external, as well as characteristics of people's personal images of God. I personally speculate that a my statement about a more merciful God being less active, as well as the corollary to this, may be true. But I have no hard numbers to back it up. So I must one again state and admit that this is just a hypothesis.
A brief mention about the mathematics. I have shown a one dimensional graph, and then a two dimensional graph. At some point in the future, things will get tricky, because I cannot draw more than two dimensions on a flat computer monitor. However, in mathematics, you can have as many dimensions as you want. I myself am a many dimensional being, if you count characteristics. You could represent me as a point in multi-dimensional space, where one dimension is my height, another my weight, another my circumference, another my age. There we have four characteristics, all of which can be correlated, and all of which can be drawn on a graph. However, it gets hard to visualize all four as being in the same graph, simply because we don't have any 4D paper, and never will unfortunately. But math doesn't care, we can have as many dimensions or characteristics as we want, so long as we have the imagination for it.
Now that we have a framework for this, we can start to look at more interesting situations and issues. Let me draw a table of two unlabeled axis (unlabeled because there really is no value specified).
Now I have an image where several possible externals are shown. Once can easily tell that there these different externals can be classified into three groups, a left one, a top one and a right one. Now, these three groups may represent different human models for God, maybe one clusters is Jesus, another is Allah, and another is Yahweh. Or maybe, all three, Jesus, Allah and Yahweh, are in one cluster, and the other two clusters represent Paganism and Buddhism. But no matter what human names we choose, we can objectively classify them into groups, using such classification techniques as support vector machines. Now, we see that whatever these things are, they are not necessarily a single point, but rather a cloud. So how do we refine them? We could take an average and find just one point, but that is a bit narrow. We could draw a convex hull around them, but that is too vague. How do we work with these different possible Gods, that are so close that they are obviously nearly the same, but still measurably vague?
Another interesting feature of this is now we could measure each group's width and density, and quantify each one's uncertainty (or perhaps I should say, diversity?). But again, if only I had some numerical data to draw on.
Ok, this post is getting a bit long, and it is time to wrap things up. In conclusion, I have started to develop a mathematical approach to describing externals and hopefully I have opened up your mind to a broader and more flexible approach to thinking about God and philosophy. Of course, there is much more to be done, most likely several more blog posts will follow this, in due time.
All graphics made by me and reproduced by permission of me, for use by me, possibly under fair use. Jesus's name used without permission because he wasn't answering his phone, so I could not ask him. Allah's name used without permission because I don't speak Arabic and so I could not ask him. Anyone insulted by this needs to open their minds, or at least get a life. Anyone confused by this needs to take a refresher on Linear Algebra. Anyone who has not learned Linear Algebra should learn linear algebra, or they are gonna be really lost during the next post. Also, linear algebra is sweet. No rights reserved.
