Abstract

The Psychology of Christianity

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 22 April 2002
Wednesday, Thursday, 02 November 2006

Mystical Experience

Is it a mystical experience that some Christians feel within them a being that is not themselves, and that this being gives them revelations? Or is it self-delusion based on a failure to see how the human mind works—often subconsciously? Mystics claim something more than a feeling—a vision, but the vision can be one of three categories, the biggest of which is simply an inner sense or awareness of something—a feeling! The other two are a proper vision, that is seeing something that appears real, and imagining something vividly but knowing it is not real. For most of us, only seeing something that looked real would count, but this is the rarest type of mystical vision. Mystics are not usually too discriminating in explaining what sort of vision they had, although often a careful reading does suggest which. Thus S Theresa wrote, about herself, albeit in the third person:

She was conscious of his being at her right hand, although not the way we know an ordinary person to be beside us, but in a more subtle manner which cannot be described.

The vision is nothing more than a feeling. Theologians do not trust clear visions whether of the real or the imagined types, they only trust those like S Theresa’s, the vague feelings. One reason is that people who claim to have visions that are real are most often insane:

The mystic is liable to have experience which would be considered pathological by the doctor—visions, voices, trances, etc.

R H Thouless, Introduction to the Psychology of Religion

Hallucinations are not common amongst some people but they are very common accompaniments of some forms of mental disease.

R H Thouless, Introduction to the Psychology of Religion

Hallucinations are defined in psychology as when the subject mistakes something imagined for reality. Pseudo-hallucinations are strong images that leave a strong impression but which the subject knows are not real. These two categories of hallucination therefore match the first two categories of mystical vision, the ones that are more than a feeling. So, the theologians’ chariness about visions is understandable! Another point that the theologians probably do not want to raise is that the Devil is traditionally considered to be adept at producing these hallucinations or visions to trick good but foolish Christians. Of course madness was also thought to have been caused by demonic possession, just as Christ is credited with driving demons out of the Gadarene madman into a herd of pigs nearby, and allegedly drove seven demons from Mary Magdalene, and so on. It is all proof to theologians that there is something rather suphurous about visions, despite the chief saint ot the Christians having seen Christ only in visions and never in the flesh, as the neglected brother of Christ did, presumably, ever since they were children.

Thouless has an interesting take on the subject of mystical visions. Some think the mystics had a singular ability, a powerful imagination that allows them to see more than the average person. Thouless sees it the opposite way round. The visionaries actually have underdeveloped imaginations. They have difficulty visualizing so that when they occasionally do visualize something in the normal way of normal people, it seems to be something remarkable to them, and they record it as a revelation. S Theresa used to complain she could not visualize the subjects of her meditations. She must have had a generally poor visual sense that occasionally came a little better to her and impressed her singularly, though for most of us it would have been normal thinking.

Mystical experience involves a complete detachment from material external circumstances. The aim is a unique state, often called “sovereign”—a theopathic state—which is distinguished by profound indifference, an absence of desire, an immobile or passive state, in which every object, the whole universe becomes immediate, and hope and dread vanish. The object of contemplation becomes nothing (or God, Christians say) and yet equal to the subject, the contemplative. Subject and object merge, objects have no differences, distances contract as the merged subject/object absorbs them, so that they become indistinct in the totality of the universe. The two condense into a single thing. The mystic is absorbed in an everlasting instant which is eternity.

The mystic most often is an extreme ascetic who rejects or tries to reject every human desire and comfort. They claim to be trying to eliminate their own will to become totally subject to God’s. Perhaps so, but it looks strangely Masochistic, involving self-abuse by solitude, discomfort, sleep deprivation, scourging, fasting, neglect, filthiness, and generally inviting and enduring the contempt of other human beings. Psychologically it looks like a lack of self-esteem to the extent of self-loathing. Often the initial cause of it is unrequited love, though it could be some other unfulfilled desire. The one necessitates the abandonment of others. A drunkard converted by a revivalist gave up drink but also abandoned his wife and children whom he had loved and supported despite his failing. A few years later, he lapsed into drink but returned to his family. The revivalist returned and reconverted him. Sure enough, he left his wife and kids again, but this time sold his house and left them destitute, saying they were sinners. Thereafter, he lived a good Christian life working diligently for a Christian charity! While he drank he punished himself but when he did not, he had to punish himself in a different way, and regretably others suffered too. Something similar seems to be a part of mysticism.

Mystical experiences do not seem to lead to any sense of clarity, or at least one that is describable. Quite the opposite, mystics often speak of darkness and of night, a loss of light and therefore confusion. They often seem to go into an altered state, a state of catalepsy or a trance of some kind from which sometimes it is difficult to rouse them, and they have to move themselves vigorously and pace up and down to help themselves back into the conscious world. Catholic mystics seem to be rousable often only by an order from their superior, and this is suggestive of the power the hypnotist has over the hypnotic subject. Naturally, the ecstasy is accompanied by visions, and it seems that the mystic is close to the condition called dementia praecox when the patient is permanently absorbed in a dream world.

Nor can the resemblence between many of the manifestations of mysticism and the symptoms of hysteria be gainsaid. Baron von Hügel (The Mystical Element in Religion) identified the mystic, S Catherine of Genoa, as having the symptoms of hysteria. Not all at once or continuously, she experienced insensitivity to pain, hypersensitivity to contact and to colour, inability to walk, spasms of the stomach causing vomiting, a feeling of being strangled, heart palpitations, hot flushes, coughing blood, red patches on the skin, jaundice, periods of fixity of gaze, ability to see differences between identical things, a feeling of criminality, and of being dead, emotionlessness, and an hysterical dependence on her confessor. Thouless concludes that mysticism is related to hysteria but, as usual, hastens to add “there seems no sufficient ground for supposing that mysticism is merely hysteria misunderstood by a superstitious and wonder-loving eye”. In the reasoning of Christian apologetics, he is, of course, right. Nothing is sufficient ground for properly explaining what Christians have already decided is divine.

The special case of S Catherine of Genoa is easily explained—she was a mystic and she was hysterical because she was a hysterical mystic! QED. Thouless has the further Christian excuse that, although most mystics are not already insane, if they were not mystics, they would be! Mysticism saves them from insanity. Well, that makes all the difference!

Mystics feel strongly the emotion of the completeness of the world, of its vast extent and continuity in time and space. One reason why is that their sense of self, an evolutionary development to ensure that the individual placed itself before the collective and other parts of Nature, partially dissolves allowing them to sense the whole and feel part of it. They experience the kinunity of Nature, but attribute it to a closeness with God. To a pantheist, they are the same thing, no doubt, but it is utterly misleading to imagine it is evidence of a supernatural being when it is evidence of the unity of Nature. Mystics, brought up with the notion of God, and the notion of Nature forgotten or subservient to God, describe their experience in divine terms out of ignorance. It is used by clerics to strengthen their false arguments when properly it strengthens Natural religion not patriarchal religion. The feeling can be rationally explained with no recourse to gods. It is a real experience not supernatural but natural, albeit unusual. Thoreau described it:

In the midst of gentle rain… I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops and in every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighbourhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of something kindred to me even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary… that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.

H D Thoreau, Walden

It is that same feeling of wonder occasionally experienced by most of us by Nature. Wild places dreary or not can cause a different reaction, one of awe or fear. The ancients called it panic, a sense of dread in lonely natural places. Perhaps it is the fear of losing the sense of self. Goethe, conditioned by religious training, attributes it to “the Almighty”:

When I lie in the tall grass beside the tumbling brook and nearer the ground a thousand varied blades of grass attract my attention when the hurry and skurry of the little wortld among the stalks, the innumerable incomprehensible shapes of the tiny worms and gnats are near to my heart, I feel the presence of the Almighty who created us after his own image, the breath of the All-loving who upholds and sustains us in eternal bliss, my friend, when my eyes become dim and the world about me and the heavens are imprinted on my soul like the image of a loved one…

Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther

The feeling here is of awe and reverence towards Nature, and the biblical allusions are out of place and simply intrude. Nature is not separate from us. We are in it, part of it, and it ought not to be surprising that sometimes we experience a oneness with it, a sense of unity with the whole of it. What we sense is pantheism not theism, but the theists bring in their usual apologetic art of special pleading and make up a property of God to explain it—immanence. Brother Lawrence, shows how simple it is to practice the presence of God. It is simply to gaze intently at the wonders of Nature but ignore them and think only of God:

In the winter, seeing a tree stripped of its leaves, and considering that within a little time, the leaves would be renewed, and after that the flowers and fruit appear, he received a high view of the Providence and Power of God…

Bro Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

Nothing to it. It is so transparently kidology it is hard to see why even Christians cannot see it. Only conditioning of this grossly simple type stops Bro Lawrence from seeing and comprehending what is right before his eyes and that he is describing. Instead, he feels obliged to turn to a figment. There is something immensely sad about it. People are stopped from seeing the wonder in front of them and imagine something supposedly even more amazing but devoid of all proof and substance. In an account of a conversion Starbuck, the psychologist, can write:

It was like entering another world—a new state of existence. Natural objects were glorified. My spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in every material object in the universe. The woods were vocal with heavenly music.

Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion

Typically, a wonderful appreciation of Nature is circumvented into religion. Why does this person think their “spiritual” vision is clarified? Why is it not simply their vision. For the first time, perhaps, they were able to see Nature in its entirety as the miracle that sustains us. Nature is the miracle, not the imaginary being that pulls its imaginary levers. The same is true of the music, suddenly described as heavenly. The sounds of Nature are no less wonderful than its sights, but had become commonplace to this convert until Nature’s kinunity broke its way into their mentality. Yet the conditioning of conventional religion causes people to interpret their experience as diametically the opposite of what it was. Another conversion experience is the following:

One Sunday afternoon I went out into the country for a stroll. It was summer, and after walking for a few miles, I lay down on the side of a hill. I saw, stretching to the distant horizon, meadows and orchards and cornfields. The cloudless skies were gloriously blue, and the sun was flooding earth and heaven with splendour. The wonderful beauty filled me with exitement and delight. And then, suddenly, through all that I saw, there came the very glory of God. I knew that He was there. His presence, His Power, and His ggodness took possession of me…

Dr Dale, Christian Doctrine

What would have been there if this man had never been told about God? He would have had a revelation of how incredibly wonderful Nature is, yet because we live in it constantly we take it for granted. The inbursting of the kinunity of Nature is the self-same experience that the religious call the presence of God. And a similar example, to which similar comments can be made, is this by a 27 year old:

I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked and unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary obliteration of the conventionalities which usually surround and cover my life… Once it was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon, and again from the same point when I could see nothing beneath me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface of which a few high peaks, including the one I was on, seemed plunging about as if they were dragging at their anchors. What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I had been wont to attach to life. It is in this that I find my justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication WIth God. Of course, the absence of such a being as this would be chaos. I cannot conceive of life without its presence.

William James, Varieties of Religious Experience

The emphasised sentence expresses the whole experience, all the allusions to God being presumptions based on previous conditioning. Here is a shorter example given by a Welsh revivalist preacher:

When praying by my bedside before retiring, I was taken up into a great expanse without time or space—it was communion with God… From that time I was taken into Divine fellowship for about four hours.

Evan Roberts

Again the dissolving of self and the ensuing sense of a wider world is assumed to be God’s doing. It is the perpetual assumption of this experience, when there is nothing in the experience per se to suggest it. Instances could be multiplied many times.

The eastern mystics were not diverted by the idea of God as a mighty human being, and saw mystical experience more correctly. The Upanishads taught that self and the cosmos are intimately united—Atman, the self, the person, the human spirit, equals Brahman, the sacred word and power, the eternal basis of the universe, God. The phenomenal world and the empirical lives of men and women are not illusory, as some say, through a misunderstanding of the word “maya”, but Brahman and the Atman are changeless principles at the core of the changing world which is Nature. The distinction between the worlds is that of order, considered to be fundamental, and change, temporary phenomena governed by the fundamental laws of order. The unity, or kinunity, of Brahman and Atman comes through constantly in eastern writing, as Zaehner shows in these extracts (Hindu Scriptures):

This Infinite is below, it is above, it is to the west, to the east, to the south, to the north. Truly it is this whole universe.

Next the teaching concerning the ego.

I am below, I am above, I am to the west, to the east, to the south, to the north. Truly I am this whole universe.

Next the teaching concerning the Self.

The Self is below, the Self is above, the Self is to the west, to the east, to the south, to the north. Truly the Self is this whole universe.

When you think about it, it is precisely what the western mystics experience when they get into the supposed presence of God, but the eastern mystics have no such illusion. They see it much more naturally as the identity of self and the cosmos.

The barrier between subject and object seems magically to melt away, and experiencer, experience and the thing experienced seem to merge into one single whole.

Zaehner, Hindu Scriptures

The human self realizes its kinunity with the operational world—the harmonious basis of reality (see Annex, below). Thus it seems to be “indescribable reality”, the “real of the real” as the Upanishads author calls it. It reveals itself in a flash, and the astonished mortal appreciates themself as immortal, beyond the boundaries of self and therefore seeming to transcend space, time and causation.

Whoso knows he is Brahman, becomes this whole. Even the gods have not the power to cause him to un-Be, for he becomes their own self.

Upanishads

The Hindu scriptures are the product of a polytheistic society, and have not been thought of as, themselves, the unchangeable word of any one god, but come from many religious traditions, and have evolved with the commentaries of many thinkers. So the divine is also no one god, but is the essence, the order or harmony, the operational level of existence. It is not anthropomorphic, although it is sometimes allegorized as a person. It is not conscious, and no one retains any personal consciousness when they die. Brahman is order seen as universal, and Atman is the same order as applied to the individual. By becoming Brahman, the person briefly sees that they are truly part of the universe, part of a cosmic being where ego—separate individuality—is meaningless. Brahman is the metaphorical “ocean into which the soul merges when it is released from the bondage” of self in this life. It is a “fire from which the phenomenal world emerges like sparks”, but it is also the law, order, harmony, the basic stuff of Nature that makes the phenomenal world do what it does.

Of course, the impression one has of the world depends on one’s situation in it. Those born with terrible deformities or with disabilities might see nothing too wonderful in it. Those born in cruel subjection or in dire poverty might also have a less rosy view. Thouless gives the example of Dostoievsky, who was epileptic. In The Idiot, he mused on the epileptic condition in which for just a second, “it was never more than a second”, “his whole heart, and mind, and body seemed to wake up to vigour and light, when he became filled with hope and joy, and all his anxieties seemed to be swept away for ever”:

These moments, short as they are, when I feel such extreme consciousness of myself, and consequently more of life than at other times, are due only to the disease—to the sudden rupture of normal conditions. Therefore they are not really a higher kind of life, but a lower.

Even so, he thought:

What matter though it be only a disease, an abnormal tension of the brain, if when I recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life?

He felt he would give his whole life for that single instant, which seemed to be worth a lifetime. But otherwise “he saw only too clearly that the result of these ecstatic moments was stupefaction, mental darkness, idiocy”. Yet the “intense beatitude” in that moment seemed to make it worth a lifetime, and it also seemed intensely real. Dostoievsky noted in passing that Mohammed, who also was an epileptic, had visited all the dwellings of Allah in less time than it takes to empty a pitcher of water. It must have been a similar epileptic moment. The mental fault that causes epilepsy might have the effect of sometimes pulling down the barrier that distinguishes self from the rest of Nature, and that kinunity then experienced is the wonder they sense, not God. Dostoievsky realizes that it is not, but is caused by his illness. The illness stops him from being too gullible.

The world cannot be as wonderful when the individual creature is handicapped in some way because according to evolutionary theory they are then not well adapted to survive in it, and so their experience of their environment is harsher. The same is true to individuals of a species who are starving, surrounded by predators, afflicted with disease or parasites and so on. The evolutionary dualism of Nature has its consequences.

Siddharta spent his life living in luxury as an Indian prince and had no idea of the awful suffering of the ordinary masses, until he went into the wider world to find out. Then the cruelty and misery of the world impressed him, and even death was no relief for people were thought to be reincarnated. Buddha saw the world as unhappiness, and he formulated a way of relieving it—the eightfold path. It all boils down to not aggravating suffering, and that is the same as loving your neighbour, where loving is explained by Paul as doing what is pleasant for them. Paul had come to a view of the world that emphasized guilt for sin, and promoting mutual love was his choice for solving the problem.

Schopenhauer came to the same conclusion from a different argument, but one that Adelphiasophists accept. It is natural that creatures strive to live. They put themselves first in the struggle for life, but to do so, they must have a sense of self and the will to live. It is in this sense that Schopenhauer said people were embodied will. Self and the will to survive are the cause of universal conflict, and it is at the root of evolution—it is the conflict of species and of individuals in a species that cause suffering through perpetual competition for resources. Suffering is thus a normal condition of life. Happiness occurs when suffering is reduced, as when there is a temporary abundance. So, for humans, harvest time is always a time for joy and rejoicing. Schopenhauer thinks that only by denying will can suffering be stopped, and that is done by deliberately using our powers of reason to suppress our natural will to cause suffering. It is the same as the eightfold way, loving your neighbour, even more so loving your enemy!

So, though these problems are natural and constant, they are problems that humanity and human society can address through reason. Human beings are horrible to each other, and will not learn, despite the supposed benefits of religion, that they ought to be nice to each other to everyone’s mutual benefit. The present leaders of the western world, swaggering Christians though they are, have no intention of being pleasant to their enemies. But then the “born again” leader of the world seems utterly incomprehending about everything, yet still has sixty million Christian votes behind him.

The idea of God leads people to reject Nature. Nature has become for such people, what is bad in the world. God is what is good. Even to admire Nature for many Christians, some of them saints, is to sell your soul to the Devil:

What used to seem sweet to me now seems bitter, because all old beauties and all sweetnesses that have an admixture of the creature are corrupt and spoilt.

S Catherine of Genoa, Vita

God made Nature in Christian belief but here a saint declares His work to be corrupt and spoilt, presumably by the Evil Spirit. It smacks of Cathar dualism, a heresy, but this is a Catholic saint speaking!

Christians do not appreciate that they can live without God—many people do—but they cannot live without Nature. In theory, such people ought to be anxious to leave this natural Vale of Woe they are obliged to suffer, and should rejoice when anyone does, but they do not. They bewail the death of their friends and relatives, and gloat over the deaths of their supposed enemies, whether they know them or not. Again, usually they do not.

Anyway, Thouless concludes that the human experience of the world is certain to make any religion dualistic. Our own view of what is good and bad for us in Nature conditions God’s view of what is good and bad absolutely. It is the source of the dualism that is constant in Christianity, the battle of God and Satan, the good spirit against the evil spirit, a truly primitive vision of the world. Christianity is dualistic, though, with typical dishonesty Christians claim it is not while blaming sin on to the evil god, Satan, and apparently the design of awful elements in the world like the limbless parasite on to him too. And by inventing these supernatural beings, the actual source of them in Nature, even Nature herself, is forgotten.

The Other World

The notion of another world is very old. Duality is an ancient religious idea, but one which was first treated philosophically around the time of the Iranian incursions into the world of the Greeks, evidently impressed by the philosophy behind the dualistic religion of the Persians—Zoroastrianism. From an intuition of the duality of Nature, religions have built an amazing phantasmagoria—the spirit world—entirely speculatively, and have fossilized it in dogma. Now they refuse to look at more serious and better founded attempts to do what they failed to do.

The early scientist, Thales of Miletus, a city shortly to be subjected by the Persians, had the hypothesis that the underlying world was made entirely of water, one of the four elements, water, air, earth and fire, recognized then. It was an idea possibly inspired by the Babylonian water god and god of life, Ea or Iah, but also justified by observation. The forms that water took on besides its own appeared as earth, air, and fire. Mixtures of these elements made the variety of things we find in Nature. In modern terms, Thales was saying that water appeared in different phases, and mixtures of the phases produced the other elements. Water in fact appears as a solid phase, ice, identified as earth, and as a vapour phase, steam, identified as air, and perhaps fire when hot. So the idea was not stupid.

Heraclitus said the world was made of fire, another of the four ancient elements. The world was constantly in flux, just like fire. Democritus said that nothing was solid because the world was made of atoms. Anaximenes thought air was the basic substance of the world, Anaximander thought it was a boundless substance that reminds us of space-time, a remarkable thought for the time. Plato decided that the real world was the world of forms or ideas, perfect originals of the imperfect copies that appear in the natural world. This world is akin to shadows projected from the “real” world of forms on to a wall, and the shadows on the wall are all that we can see. The world of perfect forms sounded like heaven to Christians who decided that Plato was one of them, so they took over Platonism as their philosophy.

Later western philosophers regarded the material world as the world of appearance or phenomena, behind or below which was a “real” world or a world of noumena. From this, some concluded that the world was not real, it was an illusion in the mind of the observer. Bishop Berkeley went so far as to reject a phenomenological world entirely. Locke had accepted the phenomenological world as self-evident, but acknowledged that all we knew of it was the impressions it left on our senses formed into ideas in our heads. Berkeley therefore claimed that only the ideas were real and offered no evidence for any outside reality. If there were nothing outside the ideas could still be there.

One trouble is that if all is illusion, there is no motive for doing anything including worshipping God who is part of the illusion and therefore just as arbitrary. We might as well enjoy it as if it were a good film or videogame, drinking, chasing women, gambling, and generally being hedonistic. After all, it is all a dream, right? The Christian cannot logically dissolve reality and remain a Christian. The world has to be real even for a Christian, but it is not the best of worlds. That is the world to come, and it is more real than the real world!

If nothing existed to stimulate our senses, where would our ideas come from? Locke had distinguished ideas of sensation and ideas of reflexion. Hume distinguished respectively impressions and ideas. With no impressions there could be no ideas. Kant accepted the same, calling them respectively particulars and concepts. But some concepts were not based on the direct perception of our senses, and Kant called them categories. They are ways of structuring our impressions of the world, but not, he believed, derived from it. Rather the brain imposed them on to the impressions received from the phenomenological world. The mind has developed these structures that it imposes on to its perceptions of the world to understand them. The implication is that the world must exist, must be real, for otherwise there could be no such structures. They would have no purpose. Any object in the world unstructured by mental categories Kant called the “thing in itself”. The world as we perceive it suitably structured, is the world of phenomena.

In the light of Darwin, we can appreciate that the mental categories have evolved over the aeons as life has evolved. They do depend on the outside world contrary to Kant’s belief, but the dependence has grown to be an instinct over millions of years. They necessarily match the real world because, by evolving, they gave animals an advantage over those without them. Perception worked better and these creatures survived better. The structures are therefore innate, not conscious, having evolved before consciousness did.

The observations of different observers show that they are observing the same phenomena. That is what science does, and goes on to use its observations in the world of appearances to get at the underlying world of laws and causes. So, ancient philosophy, ancient religion, and modern science agree that the world can be interpreted as being dual. Schopenhauer saw the world as dual, consisting of the physical world, and the world of the will, this latter equating with Kant’s world of noumena. He considered that will to live was the cause of human suffering. The world of the will was the subliminal urge of the self to survive and is a universal urge, only divided by self. So it is the division of will by self that causes conflict and suffering, and by overcoming self, a cosmic unity can be glimpsed—a kinunity! It is this that mystics take to be a vision of God or paradise.

Schopenhauer thought that denial of will, denial of Nature in effect, was the only way to stop suffering, and, because humans were rational, reason should offer a way of doing it. However, agreement is only ever reached in the grave, as Josif Stalin put it, so, with some justification, Schopenhauer, as a student of Hinduism and the perpetual pessimist, concluded annihilation—Nirvana—was the only way that will would be removed. It echoes the Christian notion of the End of the World, which came through Judaism from Persian Zoroastrianism. God would end the sinful world and judge its inhabitants living and dead, condemning some to permanent death by throwing them into a supernatural fire, while others would enjoy an everlasting life of bliss in the kingdom of God. Thus the will to live would end forever, and the world would be restored to a prehistoric timeless paradise that had been spoiled by the Evil Spirit inventing time. In reality, it is extinction of the species, the world continuing with no knowledge of time because there would be no thinking animals left in it. They, of course, would have the will to live still, but not being self-conscious, they would know nothing about it.

The basic idea of all this is that the world is not what it appears to be. There is an apparent world, and beneath it a “real” one. Science accepts that the world of appearance or phenomena that it studies has behind or beneath it an unperceived world. What we see when we look at the world is conditioned by our senses which are limited. So, the world is a world of appearance only. Like an animal that can see only shades and not colour, we might not be able to see things as they are, but that is not to say they are not there at all.

Today we know atoms are made up of protons and electrons, neutrons acting as if they were a combination of a proton and an electron. Different combinations of these make up the hundred or so elements we have, and combinations of these make up the millions of molecules that provide us with the rich tapestry of life. So the modern scientific idea is akin to the ancient ones. The world is not what it appears to be. Underneath the surface, it is more uniform—more united. This underlying world, the world behind the world of appearance can be very strange indeed—it is the world of quantum mechanics—but it cannot be anything we like. It must yield the world as we observe it, the world of appearance. We can discover about this underlying world by using science, by formulating hypotheses that have some consequences that we can observe, and then checking them out by observation and experiment.

Calling the world we live in, the world that is real to us, only an apparent world or world of appearances is absurd. It is our real world, and so it is real, not apparent, to us. Kant called the underlying level of laws and causes the noumenal level, a good name but not immediately obvious in meaning to modern people. Let us call it the “operational level” of the world. The operating level of the world, the world of laws and causes, of metaphorical cogs and levers, is not real but a world of our imagination, albeit bounded by reality, the world of phenomena.

The sad thing is that the old error of calling the operational world the real world has led to the devaluation of the world we actually live in and experience, and of Nature. This world is a vale of woe and is wicked. The proper place for us is heaven—a freely imagined place! Christians still think it. It is bizarre because it reverses everything quite contrary to all reason and direct experience. The imaginary is declared real and the real is declared an illusion. Today Moslems will unhesitatingly blow themselves up believing this world is an illusion and they will be going immediately to a better place that is real! Christians believe the same, even if they are not so convinced they want to do it.

Essentially the operating level can never be known. It can never be known, that is by direct observation. Our senses cannot directly perceive it. There will always have to be some scientific instrument or hypothesis between it and us. If the real world is one only of appearances because it is restricted by our senses, the underlying one is even more restricted. That is why any theory of it has to be corrigible. Essentially, to know the operational world depends upon our intellect, upon thought and reason. Whatever it is has to be deduced, and the deductions depend on observations that might be inexact, or subject to boundaries and limitations that are not immediately obvious. So, hypotheses have to be correctable, subject to revision or abandonment in favour of better ones. Religious people who like permanence, find this all too difficult. Yet their permanent answers are utter conjecture at best and fantasy at worst, so what makes them so attached to them?

The scientific explanation of the operational level of existence is actually also an imaginary world. That is why Kant called it noumenal, pertaining to thought. But unlike fantasy, and religious speculation, it does not allow free license to the imagination. Fairies, dragons, demons and souls are not indiscriminately admitted to it. Whatever is proposed for the operational level of the world has consequences in the phenomenal level that can be observed as phenomena, and therefore used to test the hypotheses. The world of pure thoughts, of imagination, is vast, bigger even than Nature since mortals can be immortal, and horses as well as pigs can fly in the imagination. The imagination can create the impossible, and that is why the operational world is not the world of pure imagination, but of the imagination subject to it producing phenomena that can be observed. The supernatural is possible in the imagination, but in the operational world, however fantastic and counter intuitive some idea might be, it must accurately predict how Nature works. In the operational world, only what explains the phenomenal world is allowed.

With the correct intuition that the phenomenal world has a noumenal world behind it, humans have made the error of allowing anything imagined to be in it, but it is not so. Science is interested in boundaries, in limits within which something is true. It is not true that everything is possible. The impossible is weeded out by reference to phenomena.

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