If something like a god exists, it will be whatever it is. Some transcendent and immutable state from which all quality emerges perhaps. But the moment we project human abstractions and embellishments onto the idea is the moment we, well, fuck it up.
I'm very strongly inclined to agree with you.
But an argument can also be made we humans can't think about anything, in conceptual terms at least, unless we imagine the object of our thoughts as having some qualities that individuate the concept and make it distinct from other concepts. Even if we are operating by pure ostension, by the equivalent of pointing at something and saying 'THAT, whatever the hell it is', we still have to have some means of fixing the reference so we aren't just pointing at random.
Those kind of semantic processes work well enough with the everyday objects of experience. But can they work with transcendent beings?
It's conceivable that the world's contemplative traditions might possess meditative techniques to 'tune into' - how can we say it?... reality's Source or something (if such a thing exists) - in non-conceptual and non-cognitive ways. In these cases, ostensive reference, the direction we are pointing, might be established by the technique.
Traditional religious conceptions of God don't make sense because they're basically just inventing the details as they go along. In fact we've all seen details get invented on the fly in these very forums in response to critical evaluation. It basically goes "God can't be Y, because X", and the response is "well, maybe God isn't Y, but Z". And then weeks later, "God is Z".
Yeah, that's the way it seems to work.
I think that people hold onto their concepts of God largely for psychological reasons. The contents of the concept are drawn from early childhood religious teachings, from more formal study of the traditions, from pious desires to exalt the object of belief with perfections, from thinking about problems such as the one raised in this thread, and from considering other people's ideas and reshaping their own in response.
Philosophical theology tries to systematize all that, tries to reduce it to a formula, generating a concept of God that's resistant to the kind of philosophical problems that we are discussing in this thread, that's consistent with tradition and with the contents of what are believed to be revealed scriptures, and emotionally satisfactory to religious believers. Predictably, they haven't had a whole lot of success, but seeing as how the Christian theologians have been at it for almost 2,000 years now, they've inevitably generated a lot of ideas and written a lot of books.
If religious people would just stop making claims that they can't possibly be qualified to make, and admit that it's just a mystery, I doubt that my atheism would ever really show. In fact in that context, I'm not even really an atheist at all, more of an agnostic.
I think the same way.
Here are some of the reasons why I tend to like the religiously motivated agnostic non-cognitivism that we sometimes encounter in the world's mystical traditions. They are taken from an
earlier thread about theistic agnosticism. Of course, my saying that I'm fond of this kind of religiosity doesn't necessarily commit me to believing that its supposed transcendent object actually exists or that the mystics indeed have established some kind of non-conceptual contact with it. I'm actually still kind of skeptical about that. But I don't 100% reject the idea either. I haven't experienced the Jhanas or the Samadhis for myself.
I will say that I consider the mystical and contemplative traditions to be a higher and more sophisticated form of religiosity than the more familiar, highly conceptual doctrinal forms.
Why do I like them?
Believing that God is ultimately unknowable in a cognitive, propositional sense, they typically make fewer claims about God than other theists do.
That involves them in fewer epistemological difficulties.
They are less likely to set themselves up as God's earthly mouthpiece, proclaiming the minute details of what God supposedly thinks and commands.
They are less likely to proselytize.
Their emphasis on personal experience means that they often recognize that everyone needs to experience things for themselves and hance has their own path to follow.
They are far less apt to anthropomorphize God, to imagine God as if God was a human personality blown up really large.
Hence their non-conceptual concept of God (so to speak) seems to me to be more likely to be true and accurate when it's applied to the transcendent dimension of life and to whatever it is that may or may not ultimately account for the universe and Being itself. Whatever lies out there (if anything does) is probably something very unlike us and unlike anything we've ever imagined.
They acknowledge and speak to the emotional and spiritual side of life in ways that others don't.
They help show us a hermeneutical way to 'read' the world's various religious traditions in such a way as to preserve what's good in them, their art, their beauty and their wisdom, without throwing it all away in a fit of atheistic anger.
They show a way that the worlds religions, so different and so inconsistent on the doctrinal level, can be reconciled at a higher experiential level that transcends words.
There's less chance of them getting into any turf-battles with science.
They teach and practice contemplative and meditative disciplines that I think can be very valuable.
Perhaps as a result of that, their inner peace and calm, their depth and emotional resonance, and their ethical behavior sometimes impress me.
