[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.
