Typhon

The "ineffable" mystery as a shield for god

There is nothing ineffable about mystery. It has been and continues to be, described, defined, and discussed by humans. The success of these illuminations of the natural truths of the world, can be seen all around us, in the growth of our diverse fields of knowledge, in the preservation (and indeed, destruction) of life and our own flickering mortality. There is no ineffable mysteries, only those who either lack the tools or the commitment to further unlock the secrets of the universe.

Fortunately for us, it will always be those who do, and who go forth and defy the Cassandra-like admonishing of the pundits, pastors, priests, and peddlers and sellers of awe over understanding (as if the two could not exist, side by side) and define, illuminate, and further map out our ever growing knowledge of our universe and beyond.

It is a shame that people like David Mathews would, likely even with good intentions, or so it seems, have us turn away from this perhaps, most noble of all pursuits. There is no "ineffable mystery" when it comes to the universe. He and all the wishful theists in the world have never been able to show this for all the sagely pronouncements to that effect. Much to their dismay on the part of some, enforced willful ignorance on the part of others, and anger and lashing out in still more of the faithful, the ancient laws that the world and its mysterious corners are given by the gods as being unknowable and forever out of the reach of man, fall daily to the wayside, burnt away like so much dew on the cobwebs at dawn.

One of the wonders of the universe is that it is perceivable, knowable, and that no matter what its scope, the mind of man, slowly perhaps, painstaking, in fits and starts at times, makes its crawl across it, learning, describing, coming to new understanding everywhere it goes. Perhaps the mystical minded theist fears that when the universe lays beneath the growing light of man's knowledge, the gods will have nowhere left to hide.

Show me an ineffable mystery, and I'll show you a man who is merely too lazy or too fearful to seek the knowledge that awaits discovery there.

.T.

[ July 10, 2002: Message edited by: Typhon ]</p>

Typhon

While I feel somewhat sheepish (please no baaaad puns here like we saw on Gurdur's goat thread, snicker) about replying to my own post (bump!), I just wanted to say I was really hoping for a reply from David Mathews on this one.



Of course all are welcome and encouraged, but while I have some problems with David's reasoning from time to time, I like his calm style of debate.

I know he's in high demand it seems, but perhaps he'd like to respond to my comments on the "ineffable mystery" which he has remarked on several times in previous threads.

That's all citizen, nothing to see here, move along...

.T.

David Mathews

Hello Typhon,

I just noticed your post today and will make some comments.


David: I can't believe that anyone would deny the existence of the ineffable mystery. I have a read a representative sample of the writings of many cultures across six continents on this small planet, and all cultures testify to the existence of an ineffable mystery. Testifying on behalf of the ineffable mystery are primitives, philosophers, theologians and even scientists. If you listen carefully enough to music of all types you will find references to this mystery, hints and allusions to the mystery are common in the movies, and poets of all types are inspired by the mystery.

The ineffable mystery is inescapable. Though humans have collectively spent at least a billion man-years exhaustively searching for a resolution to the mystery, today the mystery remains in essentially the same form as it was first encountered by the prophets, poets and philosophers thousands of years ago.

Consider the following words in The Astronomer's Universe:

"An overwhelming impression of the black depths of space and the immensity of the universe has always boggled the mind. Wrote French philosopher Bernard de Fontenelle (1657-1757):

Behold a universe so immense that I am lost in it.
I no longer know where I am.
I am just nothing at all.
-- 'Conversations with a Lady on the Plurality of Worlds,' 1686

Fontenelle lived to be 100 years old but he couldn't find himself. The search for identity in the vast cosmos is too baffling for most persons, who turn to mysticism and theology for answers. Not so the modern breed of cosmologists, who feel confident they are closing in on the solution to the great mysteries of how everything began and how it will all end. About the new concepts, Lev Landau, the brilliant Soviet physicist, once commented, 'Cosmology is often wrong but never in doubt.' Landau's words reflect the enthusiasm that always accompanies new conceptual 'breakthroughs' and the later sober realization of how difficult it is to establish proof."
(The Astronomer's Universe. Herbert Friedman.)

You see that the solution to the mystery seems always so close but just before humans capture it, it slips away. Cosmologists think that they are different from the mystics and the theologians, but they are merely serving the same function for a new culture which has appointed scientists to serve the same functions as their predecessors.

The ineffable mystery is also evidenced in the physics of the subatomic realm. There was a time when scientists were aware of the existence of atoms and thought that they have divided matter into its smallest form. Then they discovered the components of the atom in the proton, nuetron and electron. That was a little more complicated than the atom but still quite simple. Soon enough, though, the population of subatomic particles exploded and scientists realized that these formerly fundamental particles were actually composed of other smaller particles. Now scientists are talking about superstrings and ten dimensional space.

The more that these scientists look, the more complicated reality becomes. Complexity was hidden behind the apparent simplicity that scientists had discovered.

If these physical mysteries have proven themselves nearly unresolvable by the greatest minds of the 19th, 20th and 21st century, consider how unlikely it is that humans will ever resolve the ineffable mystery.

If we humans have such difficulty with physical things, we are utterly hopeless about spiritual things. While for the physical mysteries we know the questions but do not know the answers, for the ineffable mystery we don't know the question and have no starting point upon which to begin seeking the answers.

The Sikhs speak of this mystery in the following manner:

"Sages amass their intuitions,
mathematicians amass their calculations,
scholars, meditators and their leaders with their teachers,
but none can measure a grain of your greatness."
(Asa Mahalla 1. The Name of My Beloved: Verses of the Sikh Gurus)

The secular humanists deny the mystery but they seem aware of its existence:

"Our planet revolves around a medium-sized star, which is located near the outer edge of an everage-sized galaxy, which is part of a galaxy group consisting of nineteen other galaxies, which is part of an expanding universe that, while consisting mostly of cold, dark space, also contains perhaps one hundred billion galaxies in addition to our own. Our species has existed only a very short time on the earth, and the earth itself has existed only a short time in the history of our galaxy. Our existence is thus an incredibly miniscule and brief part of a much larger picture."
(The Humanist Philosophy in Perspective by Frederick Edwords)

I detect some awe in these words. What can anyone say about the vastness of space and time, when our life is confined to such a small space for such a short time? That mystery is great, but the ineffable mystery is greater.

Isaiah speaks of the mystery in a different manner:

"'For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,' says the LORD. 'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My wats higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.'"
(Isaiah 55:8-9)

Moses expressed the ineffable mystery in the form of God's name: "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14). The boundary between the known and unknown is stated in noted in Dueteronomy 29:29, "The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever ..."

The ineffable mystery that these individuals encountered, the great mystery that the humanists acknowledge, the mysteries which the cosmologists and physicists have uncovered: You can spend your life searching but you will most certainly not resolve this mystery.

Humankind can invest ten billion man-years in solving this mystery and at the end of time the mystery will still remain. I can't imagine that anyone would deny the existence of the ineffable mystery.

If anyone would like to resolve this great mystery, please do so. I don't imagine that anyone will because millions of humans have already attempted, and every one of them has failed so far.

Sincerely,

David Mathews
<a href="http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1" target="_blank">David Mathews' Home Page</a>

sandlewood

Argument from Ineffable Mystery:
1.) The Universe is a large complex place and I can’t understand all of it.
2.) Therefore, God exists.

It sounds like you are romanticizing mystery. I don’t know what specifically you are referring to as “The Mystery”. There are things we don’t know yet. Ok. Why call that “the mystery”. We may be filled with awe when we think about things we don’t know, but I fail to see how that means a god exists.

Reality was always that complicated. We just hadn’t learned it yet. Before, we knew less. Now we know more. So therefore God exists?

Three hundred years is a short time. Humans may continue to exist for another million years. What’s the hurry? And again, what specifically is the ineffable mystery that needs to be solved? Sorry if you explained this in another thread, but I haven’t had time to read them all.

How can we be so hopeless about spiritual things when so many people claim to have all the answers spiritually?


I still don’t know what mystery you are referring to. How can you know what we won’t solve in ten-billion man years? (How many years is that in dog years?) How does show that God exists?

If by “ineffable mystery” you just mean that there are a lot of things we don’t know yet and we are in awe of how big and complex the universe is, then I’d agree with you. I don’t know what that has to do with religion, though.

I’m not surprised we should be in awe of something big. We evolved completely while in an environment that was not so large. We evolved completely in an environment that did not include the “strange” quantum-level behaviors or uncaused events. So our brains did not need to evolve any ability to make sense of these things.

Edited to add this from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which just came to mind:

[ July 11, 2002: Message edited by: sandlewood ]</p>

Typhon

I deny the existence and validity of the "ineffable mystery." I deny it, and with good reason.

It is small wonder that the philosophers and theists of the past have looked out onto the world and upwards to the starry skies and seen an "ineffable mystery" at times. I would furthermore challenge that this is even the full truth of our millions of years of development into thinking, modern beings. A great many among even the philosophers and priests have long insisted that the world was understandable, perceivable, and accountable. Tales of creation, stories of gods and titans, explanations for everything under the sun and more, have long been a persistent and core staple of nearly all ancient peoples and civilizations. We are pattern seekers and symbol makers who are not content to merely observe in wonder what we can instead learn from, give meaning to, and in turn harness.

As we look around ourselves today, or step back a thousand, or even three thousand years into our past, we can gaze upon the great accomplishments, learning, art, science, and truths that we have uncovered and know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that these are not the work of a race encumbered by a blind homage to an "ineffable mystery" of which you speak. Now in the distant past right up into the modern present, we have moved in fits and starts, gone down false turns, and made innumerable mistakes along the way, this is true. The old answers that we dug from the mystery die hard, even when replaced by better and better ones. Superstition and ignorance cling tight to our backs, a heavy load on our way to understanding.

And yet, replaced they become, shaken off and unshackled from the best minds we have yet produced. The mystery which has never been as you would have it, but always a target of the brightest, the most vigorous, the far sighted and courageous members of our species, continues to fall away like scales from the eyes. If human knowledge remains a flickering candle in the greater darkness, as the great, late Carl Sagan so eloquently put in his wonderful book, The Demon-Haunted World : Science As a Candle in the Dark, it is none the less a useful light whose illumination is far more awe inspiring than any "ineffable mystery" clinging yet to dark and lonely places.

Once we looked up into the night sky and saw a goddess or flat ceiling or even a crystalline shell, pierced with pinpricks of light, forming the bodies of gods, heroes, and monsters. Now we can gaze outward, and instead see that each star is an immense fiery ball of atomic energies, in whose dance and radiance the very history of the cosmos and the birth of the universe is writ. How much more valuable and awe-inspiring is this, than the blind thrust of ignorance and faint comfort you would have us find in an unknowable world that can never be truly embraced or explained?

The candle light of man's quest for knowledge, of his ability to not only pierce to the far corners of the universe, but to comprehend, query, test, and ultimately understand, burns brightly still. Once the rock was a thin layer over the caves of Hades. Now we know we stand on a living planet, who core is a changing, dynamic source and whose history is old and worthy of study. Embedded in its flesh are the records of millions of years of life, life whose secrets are unlocked daily in all defiance of this "ineffable mystery" you would argue for in its stead.

Granted, the universe is a large place, and it is filled with wonders, some glimpsed, others discovered, others still yet only dreamed of in the mind of science. And yet all the same, where ever the light of human knowledge and human exploration shines, the darkness recoils, pulling back, exposing the bones and elements of its construction, down to the very core substrate that makes all of reality. We can see the dance of electrons and protons, plot the course of waves and particles, split the very atom and study the subatomic behavior of the unseen. Across the universe we can detect the presence of vast black holes, galaxy eating phenomena and witness the birth of stars and even perhaps planets such as ours. We have searched and searched and the "ineffable mystery" has never reared its mythical head.

I have every reason to suspect, not based on wild and unfounded optimism or slavish devotion to reason and science, but upon the grit and daily grind of discovery and past accomplishments, that as our light grows, so will the scope of our knowledge. However imperfect or faint, as illumination is cast into the "ineffable mystery" it again and again reveals it is not ineffable at all. As we boldly progress into lands which once held only Dragons Be Here on the map of human knowledge, we find more questions, but more answers as well.

Does this lessen the beauty or profound wonder of the universe? Not at all. How much more sublime that the universe has proven to be understandable, detectable, revealable! Only a man who in some measure fears knowledge and the stripping away of old or faulty methods of thought, truly fears the illumination of our growing understanding into the dark reaches of existence. As I have said before, there is always resistance to those who would inadvertently, strip away the hiding places of gods and monsters. Fortunately for all, from even our most ancient beginnings, the dire pronouncements of the various cults of conservative mystery worshipers have never held back the success and discovery of those who seek the truth and the knowledge that lies in an understandable if vastly complex and amazing universe.

I thus deny the validity and truth behind the claim for an "ineffable mystery." Fortunately for us all, it is likewise denied by the march of progress and knowledge, by scientists, philosophers, artists, engineers, students, freethinkers, and thousands and thousands of years of lantern-holders who went before them, and whose fruits cloth us, protect us, propel our search to the farthest reaches of space, and backwards in time to the origins of ourselves, our planet, even our universe.

.T.

"Plainly there is no way back. Like it or not, we are stuck with science. We had better make the best of it. When we finally come to terms with it and fully recognize its beauty and its power, we will find, in spiritual as well as in practical methods, that we have made a bargain strongly in our favor." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

rainbow walking

Hi Typhon,
Excellent post! The ineffable mystery is man's tortured journey out from under the shadow of death and into the light generated by his own mind, and that is why man invented gods to stand in the gap until man could take his proper place.

Doubting Didymus

Don't be so sure! As a matter of fact, is is probably more accurate to say that the mystery worshippers have always held back the truth seekers. We can not afford to sit back and be confident that the truth will prevail, as evidenced by the sorry state of affairs in american biology classes.

If the churches can sway the public opinion so heavily against evolution, one of sciences brightest candles, then the rest of the scientific establishment should be quailing. The wall of separation is beginning to crumble. I promise you! Relativity will be next! Then heliocentrism. Dont laugh, it's happened before.

David Mathews

Hello Sandlewood,

David: That the Universe is a large, complex place which humans cannot completely comprehend is attested by many different sources in many different cultures and is acknowledged by the scientists would contemplete this place.

I consider the mystery itself a powerful and eloquent testimony on behalf of God's existence. As Paul states, "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead" (Romans 1:20). The Psalmist agrees, "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork." (Psalm 19:1).

David: The awe that we feel when contemplating the vastness of space and time does not prove God's existence, it merely is an expression in small measure of the emotion that we would experience if we contemplated God.

David: The complexification of the Universe on a subatomic scale reveals that at some point our intellect is going to find this question inexplicable. The intellect of humankind is failing in its greatest success. Science is approaching a brick wall: I wonder how humankind will respond when it realizes that science has reaches its limit and can go no further?

David: Three hundred years is a short time, and there is no rush to explain the ineffable mystery. I agree. The ineffable mystery serves an important purpose in that it demolishes the human pride and arrogance which asserts that humans have answered every question and therefore God is no longer needed.

David: The spiritual mystery is greater than the physical mystery. The reason why there are so many different religious answers to these questions is because we reached the limit of human knowledge about such matters a long time ago. A time will come in which science has ceased its progression and a myriad of scientific questions will have a myriad of possible answers
without any potential for final resolution.

What will humankind do when the march of scientific progress has ended, and we are left to live with ourselves without these distractions any longer?

David: A man-year is an individual measure of time spent devoted to some cause. If a thousand people spend one year seeking to solve some problem, that amounts to a thousand man-years. What is under consideration is the collective effort of humankind devoted to solving this particular problem.

The "ineffable mystery" is the ultimate philosophical question: Why?

David: I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, two times. Great book.

Sincerely,

David Mathews

David Mathews

Hello Typhon,

"I deny the existence and validity of the 'ineffable mystery.' I deny it, and with good reason. & etc."

I enjoyed reading your post. I did read Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World" and must say that Carl Sagan's imagery is consistent with the ineffable mystery: Human knowledge is a flickering candle in the great darkness.

Religious people have been saying this for thousands of years before Carl Sagan ever existed. Religious people have known this for a very long time.

Those people who place so much faith in human knowledge and hope that it will resolve all of these mysteries and even conquer the ineffable mystery are misguided. Consider what Frederick Edwords says about human knowledge in Thew Humanist Philosophy in Perspective:

"Human knowledge is not perfect. We recognize that the tools for testing knowledge, the human senses and human reason, are fallible, thus rendering tentative all of our knowledge and scientific conclusions about the nature of the world."

If that is true regarding scientific questions, how much more true is it regarding the philosophical questions and the ineffable mystery.

Don't you see that it is the human mind which you are relying upon so much which has failed. Human intellect is limited, human knowledge is insufficient, and human wisdom is almost nonexistent. How then are humans going to solve the simple questions, much less approach the mysteries of God?

Sincerely,

David Mathews

Doubting Didymus

David.

Your reasoning contains an unjustified extrapolation. Just because we have limited understanding of the universe at the moment does not mean that we can never understand even more about it, or that we can never understand everything about it.

Please justify your assertion that because the known is finite, the unknown must be infinite.

Please enunciate the areas that you think the ever growing light of knowledge will never reach.

Also, keeping in mind that most of us here believe that god has already been explained, tell us exactly what you think is mysterious about the universe. So far you have referred only to vague eternal darknesses and the non-question "why?", which is exteremly unsatisfactory as you could pose this question and propose these dark voids even in a hypothetical universe where everything is known.