Quote:CERTAINLY, for Goff, the argument for the existence of the traditional God fails fundamentally given “evil and suffering. It’s difficult to reconcile with a loving God – the Omnigod that’s all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good”.
Perhaps we should think of creation not as an act of “god” but as “something much more generic, as some kind of goal-directedness”.
Opting for “goal-directedness” avoids the far-fetched concept of a traditional god, Goff feels, but explains the seemingly designed nature of the universe.
Equally, the fine-tuning of the universe, directed towards the “existence of life”, undermines the atheistic notion that the cosmos is “meaningless and purposeless”.
Goff adds: “Traditional atheism struggles to explain fine-tuning. Evil and suffering is the issue that the traditional God-hypothesis struggles to explain.
“Why would a loving God create the northern short-tailed shrew which paralyses its prey and eats it alive over days? That makes no sense. Why would ‘God’ choose to create us through such tortuous long-winded processes like natural selection?”
To Goff, the theory of Cosmopsychism deals with the problems inherent in both the traditional belief in god and atheism.
Modern intellectual thought is stuck, Goff feels. It hasn’t synthesised the facts of fine-tuning into a wider theory of what that these “Goldilocks” numbers mean for creation. He thinks we’re like people in the 16th century when proof emerged that the Earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. Like our ancestors, we find the new reality hard to compute.
Although Cosmopsychism is Goff’s favoured hypothesis to explain the deficiencies in both religion and atheism, he has explored other ideas.
One concept would be “to just tweak the definition of God”. Given the universe in which we live, “God” can’t be either good or bad. Maybe, Goff suggests, God is simply a designer who is “amoral, or has limited abilities”. He adds: “Maybe She’s made the best universe She can and is like ‘sorry, I know this is messy with all the evolution stuff, but it’s the best I could do. It was this or nothing’.”
This is pretty pedestrian on every level, perhaps because Goff is arguing with pretty pedestrian concepts both in religion and in atheism.
We have had analogies of the clockmaker, of the architect, the computer programmer. Now we have the psychic/psychologist.If he wants to posit some sort of cosmic conscousness - cosmophychism - he must also include one f the most significant aspects of the soul/mind,psyche = elusiveness. Or, to speak theologically, mystery.
I don't see anything new in Goff, only a dumbing down and renaming of previous, much more sophisticated and intellectually fruitful ideas.
As the sage said, it is not philosophy's business to make religion into a subject, or as he elucidated it by analogy: " it would as preposterous as to attempt to put intellect into a dog (or frightbat) by giving her printed matter to chew. She who has not extended her spiritual interests beyond the hurry and bustle of this finite world, nor succeeded in lifting herself above this life through aspiration, through the anticipation, through the feeling of the Eternal, and who has not gazed upon the pure ether of the soul, does not possess in herself that element which it is our object here to comprehend."
Those who have had a genuine spiritual relationship with God or any spiritual experience, have no need of philosophy or any rational explanation for how that is or is not possible. For those who have not had such experience, philosophy cannot supply them with such, nor is it the duty of philosophy to give spiritual conviction to anyone.
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New theory on God could spark new religion (Read 16187 times)
