What Is Reality?

A friend of mine recently asked "What is reality?" I whipped-up the following comments, then thought you might find them interesting too...

According to Buddhism, reality is that nothing is real, except for the ultimate oneness in which there is no consciousness and no distinction.

According to Islam, reality is that which Allah decrees. All that is or ever will be is exactly what Allah has always wanted. Even the infidels are infidels because Allah wanted infidels and so he created them. And thus Allah also wanted their perpetual torture in hell, and created both hell and infidels expressly for that purpose. Thus, reality is an illusion, in which we naively think we are actors in the play, when we are in fact the audience and our bodies run a pre-determined course over which we have no control.

According to Atheism, reality is anything we can consistently measure in a laboratory. But this creates huge problems for them in the realm of philosophy, for logic itself cannot be tested in the lab. And who is to say these same scientists aren't unwittingly in a virtual Matrix-esque world and thus all they are convinced is reality is but a fiction?

According to Marxism, reality is The Dialectic. Oppression, struggle and violence are reality. Life is cruel and cruel is ultimately good.

According to some hyper-zealous Pentecostals (whom I can criticise because I am a Pentecostal), reality is the "spiritual realm", and this physical world is a mere illusion.

According to Jesus, reality is that which exists. This includes that which we measure in the lab, and includes powers that exist outside the dimensions with which we are most familiar, and includes logic and love, joy and suffering, and everything else. Thus, when we are feeling pain, we cannot console ourself in the "knowledge" that life, including pain, is just a bothersome illusion that will disappear soon enough. We must rather acknowledge the reality of the pain and ask the next question : why this reality and what to do about it.

(As a side note, materialistic assumptions about "reality" are really quite hilarious. There is absolutely no way for a materialist to prove that there are not other random universes "out there" which operate on completely different laws and paradigms and have no connection and no capacity to connect to our own universe. Thus, the materialist's dogmatism that "matter and energy are all that is" is meaningless stupidity. Even if - as they clearly hope - there is no God, there can still be vastly more in existence than materialists acknowledge. And so materialism is a matter of chanting a nursery rhyme to yourself over and over until you're sure you believe it, instead of actually being a philosophically or scientifically defensible view. The moment a materialist can prove that this universe is the only universe that can possibly ever exist or have existed, and that there is absolutely no way that paradigms and powers unknown to our universe and impossible in our universe could exist in other universes, then materialism will be valid. But of course, such proof of the non-existence of other universes and other laws and powers in those universes, or even of a super-universe of which our own is just a tiny part, such proof is impossible to create, and thus dogmatic materialists (including most Atheists) are squeezing their eyes tightly shut and reciting a mantra instead of believing anything intelligent.)

Digg, and atheistic scholasticism (or lack thereof)

Digg.com has been around for donkeys years, but I never understood it. I had cause to use it for my first time ever just today. I read a good article by a prominent Australian Christian layperson, Bill Muehlenberg, who is not afraid to confidently and competently address popular fallacies of what Christianity is all about.

Bill Muehlenberg wrote a Letter To The Editor of one of our top three newspapers here in Australia, and commented on the ineptitude demonstrated by leading atheists in their attempts to denigrate Christianity. Well, I decided I would "digg" his article (www.digg.com), only to discover it had already been dugg! The previous digger was an atheist who entitled his diggment "As an Atheist [I] have never been so offended".

What was it he found so offensive in Muehlenberg's Letter To The Editor? Was it something in the actual content of Bill's letter? The digger was kind enough to tell us. "An attack on Dawkins and Athiests. Final paragraph is a kicker, claims we [atheists] can not love, be truthful and moral, or see beauty" Well, had Mr Muehlenberg made such an outrageous claim, I would have joined the protestation.

But of course Bill has a brain and uses it well, and wouldn't make such groundless assertions. No, in fact, Bill's points were several and good. It was in fact the Atheistic digger and his misdirected criticism of Bill's letter who revealed the very scholastic slovenliness of which Bill spoke in his letter!

Here's a link to the original News.com.au post (Bill Muehlenberg's Letter To The Editor) : http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20983690-5007146,00.html

Here's a link to the digg.com page where this atheist made inadvertant mockery of the atheists whose intellectual rigour he would assume he bears : http://digg.com/offbeat_news/As_an_Athiest_have_never_been_so_offended

And, since I'm new to Digg, and uncertain whether they ever delete comments (I'm sure a few folk would be keen to delete my comments if there's any easy way to do so! :) ), I reproduce below the text of my tuppence-worth, the two comments I added to the article :

Comment the first...

I remember reading "Farewell To God - My Reasons For Rejecting The Christian Faith" by Charles Templeton, and being appalled by how emotionally-laden and factually-scarce his reasoning was. It is my experience (and that of many I know) that atheists frequently exhibit stupendous ignorance of Christianity in their attempts to defame it.

As a Christian, I am extremely critical of various stupid things that are done and believed from time to time by those who also bear this name, but mindless defamation of Christianity itself is of no value.

As Bill Muehlenberg himself states, Biblical Christianity is cogent and reasonable. Yes - it extrapolates beyond what reason alone can conclusively state, but where the Bible can be tested by reason (as opposed to where witless and ignorant criticisms of supposed-but-non-existant Biblical claims can be tested by reason), the Bible holds it's own, and always has. I am a student of archeology, and archeology is just one of many fields of scientific enquiry which repeatedly confirms the accuracy of the content of the Bible.

So, I have no problem with atheists believing there is no God, and I have no problem with Christians believing there is one. But I stand with Bill Muehlenberg, concerned, no, shocked and appalled, at some of the emotionalism and straw-man-shooting that goes under the name of 'logic' in an attempt to disparage Christianity.

Comment the second...

Not wishing to be inflammatory, but Spootzta who originally "dug" this article, typifies the kind of intellectual sloppiness that quickly earns atheists and atheism a bad name. Spootzta states "Final paragraph is a kicker, claims we can not love, be truthful and moral, or see beauty". So let's have a look at this final paragraph :

"But for billions, non-material things such as truth, beauty, justice, love and even God are very meaningful realities, which the narrow world of atheism will never fully enjoy nor understand."

The question is not who will *experience* these realities. Love, truth, beauty, morality, etc are part of human existence, and of *course* both atheist and non-atheist alike will experience these realities. Bill Muehlenberg chose his words carefully when he said only that atheists will miss out on the *full* enjoyment and full understanding of these concepts.

Spootzta's claim that Bill claims that atheists cannot see beauty, experience love, etc, is intellectual slovenliness.

To the deist or theist, these concepts (love, truth, beauty, etc) have an a-temporal nature forged in the magnificent person of God himself. But to any atheist with whom I've had communication, these concepts are transient and in perpetual flux. If the atheistic worldview is correct, deists and theists well over-rate these concepts and draw too much enjoyment and pleasure from them. If the deistic/theistic view is correct, atheism denigrates some of the most compelling facets of these concepts. In either case and irrespective of whether atheism is correct or not, the deist's/theist's experience of these concepts is significantly beyond that of the atheist. Bill Muehlenberg's final paragraph is almost a tautology - the claims therein are almost true by definition.