New Thought movement

"New Thought" is a spiritual movement which developed in the United States during the late 19th century which emphasized metaphysical and mystical/spiritual beliefs. It single-handedly helped convert the term "metaphysics" from an arcane and respected philosophical discipline to a grab-bag of feel-good and trendy concepts.

This school of thought consists of a loosely allied group of religious denominations, secular organizations, authors, philosophers, and individuals who share a set of beliefs concerning the effects of positive thinking, the "law of attraction", mystical healing, "life force", creative visualization, affirmations, karma, energy fields (not the physics kind, but the mystical kind), and the development of personal power. It promotes the ideas that "infinite intelligence", AKA "god", is ubiquitous, spirit is the totality of real things, true human selfhood is divine, divine thought is a force for good, all sickness originates in the mind, and "right thinking" has a healing effect. Prayer and meditation are thought to lead to spiritual and physical healing through a type of spiritual mechanism.

In general, modern day adherents of New Thought believe that their interpretation of "god" or "infinite intelligence" is "supreme, universal, and everlasting", that divinity dwells within each person, that all people are spiritual beings, that "the highest spiritual principle is loving one another unconditionally . . . and teaching and healing one another", and that "our mental states are carried forward into manifestation and become our experience in daily living".

The three major religious denominations within the New Thought movement are Religious Science, Unity Church and the Church of Divine Science. Some New Thought adherents also subscribe to a monistic belief that spirit or consciousness is the sole universal substance and that all physical processes and events are either illusions, or are condensations of pure intelligence and consciousness into material form. Thus sickness is just a degenerate manifestation of an unhealthy spirit, implying that if the spirit is healed, the sickness will vanish. In any case, according to their view, the material world is only a pale shadow of the spiritual one. These movements all share the common ideal that one's thoughts and your feelings create one's life.

Modern manifestations of New Thought can be found in "The Law of Attraction", "The Secret", and "A Course in Miracles".

God of the Gaps

There are aspects of life for which no explanations can be found in science, economics, history, sociology, or other areas of empirically or rationally obtained human knowledge. For many of those experiences and phenomena, the default explanatory fallback is that god is responsible. Whether the issue is the origin of life, what happened "before the big bang", the question of life after death, or how consciousness arises, when mankind has not discovered answers, the answers must be obtained from a higher power, or a more traditional, personal and anthropomorphic god. The god of the gaps argument is known as an "argument from ignorance" ("because we don't know, then we do know"). Or as Stephen Colbert reported about Bill O'Reilly on his TV show, "Like all great theologies, Bill's can be boiled down to one sentence: There must be a god, ... because I don't know how things work".

Trying to explain the unknown in terms of the incomprehensible can never increase our understanding. As Plato realized, to say that god did it is not to explain anything, but simply to offer an excuse for not having an explanation. (Plato, Cratylus, 426a). In a similar vein, the Norm Levan Panel on Intelligent Design concluded:

Invoking the supernatural is dead-end to further inquiry. Science cannot test supernatural explanations, since they are unfalsifiable, unverifiable, and can be altered to fit any situation post-hoc.

It is a common trap that is very easy to fall into. For many people it is uncomfortable to be faced with a situation for which there is no answer - a more psychologically satisfying position is to believe that there is an answer, but that answer is known only to god. For everything that we did not understand there was always a supernatural and often sentient explanation. Unfortunately for god, the number of things that he is responsible for has been shrinking for centuries, and the pace really began to pick up after the Copernican revolution, the Scientfic Revolution, the Enlightenment (thanks to thinkers such as Galileo, Locke, Newton, Hume, Spinoza, and many others). He is now seriously underemployed. The gaps of our knowledge were once very great, but many of these gaps have been closed. God no longer causes lightening to strike, stars to remain fixed in the sky, planets to move through the sky, earthquakes (or lack thereof), volcanic eruptions, good and/or bad weather, health and disease, sunrise/sunset, rainbows, tides, the change of seasons, plagues or cures for plagues, victory and defeat in battle, or the evolution of living creatures into separate species.

Science has done an incredible job explaining the previously unexplainable through impersonal, observable, and predictable forces. Evolutionary biology and anthropology indicate that morality, altruism, heroism, and other noble and subtle human virtues, as well as the less noble ones, probably have primitive correlates in other species. Behind everything we have so far observed in the external world, natural explanations have succeeded in demonstrating that previously deemed supernatural phenomena are actually the result of causes that can be reduced to space, time, material, and physical laws. The success of methodological naturalism in eliminating gaps and explaining what previously lied within them has shown beyond most doubt that Metaphysical Naturalism is almost certainly true. Humans have found naturalistic explanations for these formerly mysterious processes that used to be attributable to god. Yes, there are things that are not yet explainable.

Given the remarkable and uninterrupted success of naturalistic explanations and the miserable failure of theistic explanations, it is very likely that these remaining mysteries (dark matter, the origin of the universe, how life was created, consciousness, spontaneous order and emergent behaviors) will be be shown to be the result of natural causes, not supernatural. The trend towards taking god out of the causal chain continues with no sign of abatement. For the last few centuries those who relied on god as the explanation for physical phenomena have experienced a long and steady string of disappointments. Unfortunately for them, this is likely to continue.

God of the Gaps is a mistake that even the best of us can inadvertently fall into. Even Isaac Newton, one of the greatest minds in the last millenium did. He discovered the laws of orbital dynamics, which explained mathematically what Copernicus and Kepler first pioneered. But he just couldn't bring himself to believe that planets could go into motion by themselves - someone had to have placed them there:

"The six primary Planets are revolv'd about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. […] But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. […] This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."

He also thought that god's hand must occasionally readjust the orbits to get them back on track when they interfered with each other. In both of these examples — one related to the origin of the motions and the other related to the ongoing motion of the planets — Newton is employing textbook God of the gaps reasoning. Scientific theories are proposed to explain as much as possible, and then God is brought in to cover any remaining unexplained gaps in the explanation. We now know that purely naturalistic explanations can account for everything to do with orbits of planets. We must always be vigilant about making the same mistake.

God is Love, God is Good

Carl Sagan addressed this very clearly in his book, Varieties of Scientific Experience, a compendium of his 1985 Gifford lectures. When challenged by a questioner with the assertion, "in reality He is there. God is love", Sagan replied "Well, if we say that the definition of God is reality, or the definition of God is love, I have no quarrel with the existence of reality or the existence of love. In fact, I’m in favor of both of them. However, it does not follow that God defined in that way has anything to do with the creation of the world or of any events in human history. It does not follow that there’s anything that is omnipotent or omniscient and so on about God defined in such a manner. So all I’m saying is, we must look at the logical consistency of the various definitions. If you say God is love, clearly love exists in the world. But love is not the only thing that exists in the world. The idea that love dominates everything else, I deeply hope is true, but there are arguments that can very well be proposed, from a mere glance at the daily newspapers, to suggest that love is not in the ascendant in contemporary political affairs. And I don’t see that it helps to say, forgive me, that God is love, because there are all those other definitions of God, that mean quite different things. If we muddle up all the definitions of God, then it’s very confusing what’s being talked about. There is a great opportunity for error in that case. So my proposal is that we call reality “reality,” that we call love “love,” and not call either of them God, which has, while an enormous number of other meanings, not exactly those meanings."

So, to assert that "god is love" is rather arbitrary. Why not say "god is beauty" or "god is hate" or "god is pizza". There is no particular reason to equate the term "god" and "love" above any other associations.When Christians say "God is love" I know what they mean - I have read their explanation. They are saying that god's essence is synonoymous with "good". God could not issue immoral commands. His essential goodness and loving character] would keep him from issuing any unsuitable commands. This is just begging the question again - assuming that there is a good and a bad prior to god, and that god would not do bad things.

But further, "good" is an adjective. "Goodness" and "Badness" are nouns, but not physical objects, not like a ball or a cloud. They are human-generated categories, abstractions into which we place behaviors, thoughts, actions, intents. We measure things by our conceptions of good and bad, and assign those attributes to the things we judge. To say god is good, in the sense of actually equating those two concepts, is just incoherent wordplay - stringing subject and predicate together with the word "is" in between, and hoping that some kind of meaning will emerge. Lexically, "god is good" parses fine. It just doesn't happen to mean anything.

Last - it is obvious that we have our own conception of good and bad prior to anything having to do with god or the bible. When we read the numerous atrocities in the bible, we are appalled. Our innate sense of good and bad causes Christians to (1) deny that those things actually happened, or (2) claim that it is just a misreading of the bible, or (3) argue that god had a good reason for doing horrible things that we just don't understand, or (4) say that with the New Testament, all that torture and murder in the Old Testament doesn't matter anymore. None of those arguments can deal with the simple fact of recognition - that we, as humans using our innate sense of "reflective equilibrium" can tell right from wrong. We know that there is no way to justify the genocide of entire races of people, as god commands more than once. We already know that is wrong - it is bad. Anything god has to say about it in the bible is just an afterthought.

Spiritual but not religious

Even less god-focused than the "higher power" mindset I covered in the previous section is a new set of "spiritual but not religious" belief systems. These are just as generic and non-specific, but differ in that they don't have a god-centered basis. As such, they don't even qualify as "conceptions of god", which is what this blog is about. They can range from vaguely deistic to completely atheistic. They carry the belief that something divine or sacred is out there, some universal organizing force, but it's difficult to say exactly what that is.

This "un-doctrine" may be gaining popularity as an anti-clerical response to the unsavory reputations that many Christian religious denominations have earned in recent years resulting from sex scandals, child molestation, rape of nuns, general disrespect for women, financial fraud, blatant pandering, crazy rituals, laughable televised faith healing, crooked or perverted pastors, revelations of shocking inner circle practices, transparent scams, unbelievable claims, conspiracy, and outright crimes. A large number in this growing "un-churched" demographic are former members of traditional Christian denominations (Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics, Evangelicals, generic Christians, etc) who no longer identify themselves as belonging to those denominations, but still want to retain a sense of the mystical and basic spirituality without the burden of heavy tradition, out-of-fashion concepts, antiquated gender mores, and hidebound orthodoxy.

Polls in the US during the last few decades show a growing number of people in the "no religion" camp who still are uncomfortable adopting atheism. They have an aversion to the religious establishment and "organized religion". The "spiritual but not religious" individual wants to have contact with the mystical and spiritual, but without committing to any specific beliefs or actual doctrines. "Spiritual but not religious" is a philosophical destination for some, and for others it is a mid-way point on the transition from the religiousness of their youth to agnosticism or unabashed atheism. This type of belief breaks downs along several lines:

Mystical variety

The mystical version is frequently associated with reports of out of body and near death experiences, visitation by angels, ghost encounters, ESP, precognition, astral projection, non-traditional healing modalities, homeopathy, synchronicity, UFOs, vague notions of karma and reincarnation, and ancient but forgotten wisdom. People who are part of this group have substituted one kind of unsupportable faith (traditional religion) with another (new age fads). In decades past the types of beliefs that were popular for these people were mediums who could communicate with the dead (as with Madame Blavatsky), seances, fairies, trolls, mind reading, levitation, and more.

Naturalistic variety

The naturalistic type of spirituality is very much like "Einstein's God", described earlier. People who adopt this world view substitute awe and wonder for religiosity. They value individual human encounters with the world, and the experiences and emotions those can inspire. All humans share the capacity to experience awe, wonder, inspiration, reverence, and a deeply moving sense of the "transcendent". This kind of spirituality requires no belief in a specific divinity figure or doctrine. What is valued here is the personal experience of a subjective emotion elicited by interactions with nature, contemplation of the wonders of life, personal relationships, and the magnificence of the universe. Einstein described himself as "a deeply religious nonbeliever". This may capture this kind of secular spirituality. Unfortunately, the word, "spiritual" carries such weighty baggage that it has practically been ruined for describing this phenomena - maybe a better way to describe it is a feeling of awe or wonder at the wonderful scheme that is manifested in unfolding of the physical universe. The modern usage of "spiritual" may be gradually transforming into a less religious form, a form that involves no deities or supernatural entities, but instead emphasizes the personal, possibly mystical, experience. Those who have these experiences (and there is no doubt that many do) are, of course, free to interpret them however they want. Some people will respond to these experiences with a strengthened belief in a deity, and others will see them as natural, wonderful, emergent artifacts of our human cognitive apparatus. Nature, science, loving relationships, images of deep space, meditative contemplation, what might be called "deep environmentalism", or even mind altering drugs can call up the more profound aspects of human experience, which in this context we would call "spiritual".

Pantheistic variety

Pantheism is a relatively modern concept. Although for millenia, people have ascribed divinity and spirituality to many aspects of nature, the modern Pantheist philosophy is only a few centuries old. The word literally means "all god", or "everything is god". Pantheists see all of nature and reality as a manifestation of god, or even as the embodiment of god, or that god and the universe are identical. As with other god-philosophies, there is no single, well defined type of pantheist. Many people who might be regarded as having pantheist views would not see each other as sharing a single worldview. It is really a very fuzzy concept, and has no specific doctrine. Although some religions have strong elements of pantheism (Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, Kabbalistic Judaism, ancient Celtic spirituality, Sufi mysticism), none of them encompass all of the others. Probably most people are not even aware of what pantheism is, unless they have actually researched it. Because pantheism is really just a very weak form of religion, I am classifying it in this "spiritual but not religious" camp.

Personal Power variety

This branch focuses on accessing personal power and untapped inner resources. It utilizes Westernized versions of meditation and a Buddhist-like reduction in focus on desire, on the self, and on "ego" (as Eckhart Tolle conceives it). It distills some elements of Hinduism, Zen, Taoism, and Buddhism into a form palatable to Western tastes by, among other things, jettisoning the mind-numbing pantheons of unpronounceable Asian deities, avatars, gurus, and other characters. With a steady avoidance of issues surrounding god and ethereal concepts, it emphasizes personal growth and achievement of inner peace by helping people attend to elements of life that are less superficial and more meaningful.

It sort of makes sense...

Every generation does creative myth interpretation, and redefines those myths in the context of current personal and cultural experiences. As a modern 21st century society, we are trying to find an appropriate language to speak to the new meanings that we find in our experiences. We are trying to recover and build a new language for the evolving understanding that is generated through advances in science and technology of the last century. The unarguable diminution of god as the author of nature (he no longer "makes the sun to rise and ascend in the skies") has left a spiritual void that needs to be filled. The new sense of "spiritual" in this language is not necessarily supernatural, but instead connotes the immaterial, indefinable, non-rational aspect of being human. Instead of referring to immaterial spirits or souls, it refers instead to the ineffable, more fundamental aspects of human experience. In our new society it is losing its overt religious meaning and is becoming secularized.

Traditional religion is declining, while "spirituality" is on the rise in the millennial culture of young people in the 21st century. Since the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, we were being told by intellects like Rousseau, Emerson, Thoreau, Ingersoll and others that we were moving towards a new secular society. But instead what has happened is an increase in both secularism and fundamentalism both in the US and abroad. A middle ground has emerged, which is a deity-free spirituality that will probably be end up being more effective than either in dealing with the new set of environmental, ecological, and social challenges we are facing in our high-tech society. It has the logical power of secularism, and the motivational, emotional force of belief.

Except for the generous helpings of psycho-babble, pseudo-science, unfounded conclusions, flawed logic, unsupportable factual claims, appeals to alternative medicine, broken history, and false analogies there is actually some useful stuff here. Especially in the West, I think most of us can admit to being too wrapped up in the temporal, acquisitive, and neurotic obsessions inherent in living in a fast paced materialistic, high-tech, post-industrial world. A way of being that helps you break free from surface perceptions and what used to be called the rat-race, to take time to smell the roses, without resorting to navel-gazing has got to be an overall positive thing.