The Epistemic Refutation of Monotheism

[This article is extracted, with minor editing, from Chapter 3 Reality of my book Human Nature: A New Theory of Psychology, 2014.  See my September blog below for a brief explanation of my Consideration Cycle, or psychologic theory.]

What has been said so far contains the first epistemic refutation of monotheism and all other forms of mysticism by tertiary reasoners who propose multiple realities.  Historically, with nothing but empiricism or rationalism to guide us, we didn’t know our epistemic process well enough to know for certain that any such proposal is illogical.  But we now know that we cannot derive any notion of a nonspatial reality in our primary reasoning, even though this is the only part of our psychologic process in which we can consider what is real or whole.

This means that monotheists and other mystics never propose a metaphysics, or theory of Reality.  Instead, they reason this way.  First, in their primary reasoning they perceive the whole Reality (or the Space) just as we all do; then in their secondary reasoning they divide this into parts.  But in their tertiary reasoning, they use some of those parts to hypothesize a fiction, or ideal, that pleases them, and they give this a class name.  They then reify that ideal, or All, in their quaternary reasoning by transforming that class noun into a proper noun, such as Time, Heaven, Mind, God, Idea, Soul, Psyche, or Spirit.  Then they use this proper noun as the whole context of some of their reconsiderations, and pretend not to notice that this new proper noun does not refer to a real event, but rather to a previously derived fictional ideal.

These monotheistic mystics deny our one Reality, but initially they must affirm it, as we all do, because otherwise they could not dissect it into parts.  Here’s their root contradiction: to say that there are two kinds of reality, such as heaven and earth, denies there is only one kind of reality, but we can’t say there are two things of any kind unless we have first affirmed, either explicitly or by assumption, that there is a single whole that subsumes them both.  In other words, we can only derive the number two from the number one, so their claim that the Whole of Everything consists of both a ‘heaven’ and the spatial world we all know presupposes that one Reality, which cannot itself be of two kinds.  It can consist of two or more parts, but in itself it is what it is, and that is a Whole.  This contradiction is one between their natural metaphysical (primary) reasoning which we all have, “There is only one Reality,” and their explicated (secondary) reasoning, “And now we can divide it into parts.”

A monotheist may reply by saying, “I do start with only one reality, and it is god; then I divide his, her, or its reality into two worlds: heaven and our spatial universe.”  The flaw in this, though, is that the term ‘god’ does not refer to a cognition of the Whole, for we can only perceive the Whole of Everything as the greatest possible space.  And this tells us that a monotheist’s god is not direct epistemic knowledge; it is an imitation of that, or explicated learning.  We all perceive the spatial Whole early in life, but we only learn of ‘god’ afterwards, from the fictional and unprovable stories told to us by our elders.  Thus, our monotheists cannot have known of a single whole called ‘god’ first, or at the start, because that ‘god’ is just a learned explication, or something that was added to their natural, or common sense, perceptions by the elders who taught it to them.

The third quadrant of our Consideration Cycle, or reasoning process, is the realm of synthesis and make-believe; of everything from children’s games and fictional art to the speculative hypotheses of mystics or scientists.  Our tertiary mystics know, as we all do, that there is only one Reality and that it is entirely spatial, but they deny this truth later when they create (synthesize) an ideal in their minds and then reconsider this hypothetical thing as if it was a real and whole event.  And that fabrication, like any fiction, can only be formed in their tertiary reasoning, which is not the primary reasoning from which all of our knowledge begins.

Mystical reasoning is born with people’s tertiary passions, which always pertain to selected parts and not to wholes.  Monotheists choose to love certain partialized fictions they have imagined—such as life after death, a benevolent god, or the ultimate defeat of evil—and to hate the whole Reality that denies these fictions, and each such passionate choice causes them to synthesize a fictional All, or hypothetical state of beingness, that they can pretend is real in their reconsiderations.  This epistemic error is the source of all pseudometaphysical or mystical hypotheses and of many failed scientific hypotheses too.  Therefore, the burden lies with our mystics and our scientists to prove, by epistemic argument, that in their reasoning they can achieve these fictions by which they deny the one spatial Reality without assuming that Reality at the start.  And I can assure you, as surely as two follows one, that they can never do that.

I should add that the best defense of theism I have ever read was in a letter by the pathological conservative Luther to the pathological liberal-con­ser­va­tive Erasmus, both of whom had the total illogic in their will system (or primary reasoning) that my psychologic theory shows is common in sincere theists.  Here Luther admitted that he has no objective grounds whatsoever for believing in his deity, that this belief is based solely on his passions, and that it is these feelings alone that justify theism for him.

In this, if not in much else, Luther spoke honestly.  To put it in my terms, there is no universally logical argument in defense of theism, but there is this reasonable argument for it that can be offered by people with impaired reasoning.  It is reasonable and hence tolerable by us for two reasons: first because those who deny the whole Reality in their primary reasoning cannot believe or have faith in anything except a fiction that the force of their passions has caused them to create or adopt in their tertiary reasoning, and second because both this impairment of one's primary reasoning and a strong passionate nature are just accidents of birth.

Obviously we can’t punish theists and mystics for being born sick, but we must at least prevent them from harming others.  An important step to this end was achieved at the time of the American Revolution, when progressive thinkers rightly proposed that there should be an absolute separation of church and state.  But of course our confused theistic rightists immediately started working, and are still trying today, to abolish this wise restriction on their right to impose their bad reasoning on the rest of us.  The primitive imaginings of psychologically impaired people cannot be prevented, but they must never be allowed to determine the fabricated rules of our fabricated societies.

You’re Wrong on Guns, Rachel!

     You too, Hillary.  And watch out Bernie; you won’t win the Democratic nomination if you decide to support gun restrictions.  It should be clear to us all, as it is to all Republicans, that if the Democratic candidate for President next year openly supports restriction on weapons, the Republican candidate will probably, against all odds, win the election.

     Remember candidate Al Gore in 2000.  Florida and the Supreme Court notwithstanding, all that he had to do to win the election over Bush II was to carry his home state of Tennessee with its eleven electoral votes.  But he didn’t because as Vice President he had supported Bill Clinton’s ill-conceived, rightist position on the gun-control issue, which most voters in Tennessee opposed.

     Virtually all MSNBC spokespersons and their newspaper, magazine, and blog consultants and guests have raised a cry after the Umpqua incident that we must do something about mass shootings, and yet nothing specific they have proposed to date would help stop such shootings.  What their proposals would do is make the control of our weapons by the federal government easier, and they would make gun acquisition more difficult for those who obey the laws.  But I protest their uniform ignorance of the deeper issues involved when they claim—as Rachel, Chris, Lawrence, Chuck, Chris, Steve, Al, Ari, Joy, and most of the others who appear on that network have done—that by supporting more gun restrictions they are expressing the leftist view on this issue.

     That is dead wrong.  Gun control is, and always has been a rightist proposal.  Stop and think about that.  As I explained in my recent book, Human Nature: A New Theory of Psychology, the only proper definitions of the terms leftist and rightist are, respectively, individualists and collectivists, for that is the true polarity in the political (or pragmatic) reasoning of all humans.  But only collectivists (which includes liberals as well as conservatives) will propose that the natural, inalienable rights of real individuals should be subordinated to the apparent needs of some collective—whether it be a family, a community, a company, a church, or a nation.  Whenever any artificial collective asserts such rights, it is advocating the suppression of a natural right of the real individuals who compose it.  And clearly in this case that right is the right of self-defense, which (as I said elsewhere):

. . . That right is as natural and inalienable as eating, sleeping, loving, and breathing.  So why should we surrender it to the massive centralist government that rightist elitists created for us in 1787 and hope to rule us with forever?

. . . The gun restrictions proposed by our collectivistic rightists, whether liberals (moderate rightists) or conservatives (extremist rightists), are irrational because they put the cart before the horse.  Only after they have helped us establish a moral government that serves and protects every individual equally can they reasonably ask us to lay down our arms.

     How could so many in our media make such a mistake?  It’s simple; when they finished school, they stopped thinking about political theory, and instead addressed the practical problems of their life as if theory was not the essence of every understanding we have and every practical decision we make.  Thus, we have Rachel Maddow (who, according to my psychologic theory, has a thought reversal) and her friends either saying or presuming that “progressives” and “liberals,” and hence all “leftists,” support gun restrictions while only “conservatives” or “rightists” oppose them.  And then they add that Hillary’s anti-gun position is a brilliant tactic that puts her to the “left” of Bernie on this issue.  Not so; Bernie has always been to her left on this, because she is (in the terms of my theory) an elitist and a conservative, just as Bush II is.

     The only danger Bernie faces here is if he backtracks.  He need only read this and my other essays on this subject in my blog to see all the reasons why he must stand fast on his leftist principles here.  He probably won’t, though, because according to my analysis of his character he, like many people, is conflicted in his reasoning on left-right issues.

     [See my more-detailed articles last month on this subject: Rethinking Gun Control and On Gun Control.]

Conception vs. Birth

     This article is extracted, with some editing for this context, from Chapter 4 of my book Human Nature: A New Theory of Psychology.

     

     Like all our problems, the solution to the problem of whether a real person begins at the instant that the mother is impregnated or at the instant that the child is born lies in philosophy.  Specifically, it lies in solving the ancient dilemma of uniqueness, which is ultimately a metaphysical question pertaining to the nature of Reality itself.  So let us begin by considering that dilemma, in the terms of human nature. . . .

     

     We all know through our common logic that we are each unique as individuals.  No one else is you.  So we must ask why our intellectuals haven’t yet explained what makes us unique.  Some ancient Greeks tried to solve the problem by positing the psyche, which literally means ‘to breathe’ and which is equivalent to mystical terms such as ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’.  They held that we are each unique because we innately possess this defining essence, which was perhaps god-given but was in any case unknowable.  So for millennia most people assumed that this imaginary thing, which theists called our ‘soul’, caused our uniqueness, and that no further explanation was needed.  Astrologers adopted this mystical explanation without objection, and then came the modern psychologists, who divided into three schools of opinion on the issue -- the mystics (including the Freudians and Jungians), the negativists (the behaviorists who deny theory), and the positivists -- none of which solved the problem.

     

     . . .  Only the positivists offered a solution, but it doesn’t withstand analysis.  Since they concluded that there is no single thing that causes our uniqueness, they had to define it as being the set of all possible attributes of a person.  But they failed to see that this is a truism, since a hypothetical summation of all our attributes must include what makes us unique, whether it is one thing or more things.  So they never explained our uniqueness, they just presupposed it by mass inclusion, and then they agreed as academics to use this class conception to assume a human’s uniqueness, and to refer to it as our personality, a term that is ambiguous, vague, and has many conflicting senses.

     . . .  The real solution to this dilemma is so well known to us all inexplicitly through our common logic that I was surprised to find in my readings that no one had ever stated it directly.  People are not unique because of, say, the color of their eyes, their race, their gender, or any summation of such shared attributes that one can describe.  They are only unique because each person is a distinct event, a motion system within the whole Reality that has a unique position in space, and that is the one attribute that makes anything in the universe unique.  For instance, I am not the only person with hazel eyes, but I am the only person here and now with hazel eyes.

     Nothing is unique to us until we identify its position in space.  Since no two things can occupy the same space at the same time, and since I have shown in Chapter 3 that ‘time’ is not a fourth dimension, but is just another way that we measure space, our space is our defining essence, and it is necessarily unique.  We share some spaces with other things, true, but not our space, which is defined by the spatial point (formerly called ‘the time’) at which we leave our mother’s womb, and then by our own zenith and nadir as we move on the earth as an independent event, or motion system.  Every other attribute of anything in Reality is shared with other things, and no sum of these relative things can explain our uniqueness, either as a species or as individuals. . . .

  

     This solution to the dilemma of uniqueness—which can only be reached through metaphysics—gives us a basic principle of our new science of human nature, and this is that any thing is uniquely defined only by its spatial position.  From this principle we can clarify several ancient confusions, such as our notions of destiny, of forecasting, and of free will, but here I will just show how it solves the old, but politically urgent, argument of whether life, and hence personhood, begins at conception or at birth.

     Critics of astrology argue that the true beginning of any event is its conception and not its birth, but this is not so.  Since the uniqueness of an event is its spatial position (formerly its spatial and temporal position), any reference that we make to the formative process that created it refers to a different spatial event, and it is fallacious to mix two contexts of reference in an argument.  If we don’t consistently hold that the point of birth is the true beginning and distinct identity of any creation, be it a new organism in a womb or a new idea in a mind, then we are either proposing an infinite regression of causes or we are arbitrarily selecting one event in the entire chain of prior events as its cause.

     This is why one who accepts astrology cannot logically oppose abortions.  Astrologists know that a distinct, unique person only comes into existence at birth, but antiabortionists (who to be consistent must also oppose natal astrology) assume that a distinct person is created solely by an act of conception and nothing further.  This is nonsense, of course, for much more is needed after that initial event to make a distinct person, and it is the birth alone that sums up all of those prenatal events that ultimately produce a real and whole person.

     

     Imagine a case where a fetus acquires a major disease or defect shortly before its birth.  We clearly can’t conclude that the act of conception caused that defect.  No, we must consider all of the prenatal events that the embryo and fetus experienced during the entire pregnancy.  So until the actual birth occurs, we can’t speak realistically, as opposed to hypothetically, of that being-in-formation as a real and whole person.

     Our metaphysics keeps our thinking straight on this, by telling us that a whole event is defined only by its spatial relativity.  Thus, nothing is a distinct event or a real context of reference until it has been born and exists separately.  So when you refer to either a notion in your mind or a fetus in your womb (which in this context are equivalents), you are not referring to the future idea or child that might later exist independently.  Until an idea or a fetus has been born into its own space and path of motion, it is not a distinct event, or a unique motion system within Reality; it is just an internal part of its carrier’s space and path.  Clearly, one cannot logically speak of the birthing process and the later process of a thing’s postnatal life as if they were the same process.  They are distinct processes by definition.  An event’s conception is always internal to its conceiver, so though we can speak hypothetically of an idea or a fetus as if it had been born, it is not yet a unique external event.  Any internal event in our mind or body that has not been externalized has no life of its own.  Strictly speaking, then, to study the prenatal development of an organism is not to study life; it is to study the formation of life inside a unique person, or motion system.

     As for the specious arguments by the conception-is-personhood advocates that a fetus ‘feels’ pain or pleasure and therefore is ‘alive’ before its birth, this is just wordplay.  The fact that a fetus can be stimulated by events inside or outside the womb and will move in response to those provocations doesn’t mean that it is ‘feeling’ sensations as we wholly formed organisms do.  By definition, a feeling or sensation requires consciousness, and yet no one has proven that a fetus has that essential quality of life.  Consciousness is an awareness of self, and there is no ‘self’ for any thing that does not exist in space independently!  Our common sense tells us that we acquire consciousness and are a unique self only when we are born and not an instant before.

     Accordingly, any social science, including jurisprudence, must begin its reasoning about a person from the point of his or her birth in space and independence from the mother’s space, for otherwise it is not reasoning logically.  Until it has a time of birth, no real person, legal person (corporation), or fictional character can exist.

     Hence the US Supreme Court’s confusions in its abortion decisions.  This rightist court, solely to serve the religions it favors, once again introduced contradictions into our legal system; this time by clouding the established legal definition of a person, as recorded by a birth certificate (which this court also did in its absurd decisions to give corporations, or fictional ‘persons’, the same rights that real individuals have).  So rather than continuing to grant legal protection against murder only to a real person, it granted it to a nonperson, to a thing being formed.

     This decision was also wrong because, like all religions in history, it subordinates women to men, who have no such issue, and it intrudes on a female’s natural right to control her future life, her private space, and her internal processes.  Moreover, we cannot equate a woman’s choice to terminate her fetus to the murder of a living person, for these are totally different acts.

     As even the father must recognize, a woman's womb is not a public matter, no more so that is her mind.  A just state must have an overriding social justification for denying our natural rights as individuals, which include the sanctity of our mind, body, or womb.  In the case of a womb, this justification does exist in our insanely overpopulated world, but for preventing births, not for requiring them.  The Supreme Court claimed that the state has a legitimate interest in regulating abortions to protect women's health and "prenatal life," but this term is self-contradictory because it assumes that the word 'life' can mean something that was never born.  It is true that the state has a duty to protect it's people's health, but a fetus is not yet a person, and that's the issue here.  In fact, this claim makes the state responsible for protecting the health of every woman who elects to abort her fetus.  But this duty does not give the state the right to oppose what real persons want for themselves or their inner processes, and especially not by discriminating against half of them.  To grant our state that right in even one case is to concede its universal right to control the minds, beliefs, and bodies of all of us, and that is a terrifying precedent--though sadly one that has long been considered acceptable by our rightists, or collectivists.