Lesson on YouTube: https://youtu.be/lWq2N14W-w0
With Pastor Jeff
Tonight’s lessons pulls from the following two sections of my philosophical dissertation:
Section 6.3, page 31 – The three circles
Section 6.4, page 33 – Why It’s Not The Few, It’s All of Us
The goal is to understand our identity (natural), and what we experience through it, and what this tells us about what exists. We will do this through a model of reality I developed for myself called “the three circles.” It grapples with concepts discussed within the cannon of philosophy (you can look those up if you are interested), but moves quickly to align this model to what Scripture tells us about our identity in Christ Jesus. In a more pragmatic sense, the realization of this identity comes with very distinct action items that we can begin to work on.
Kick off Videos:
Michael Egnor Shows You're Not A Meat Robot
(Science Uprising EP2)
Why is Christianity right?
A great answer by Ravi Zacharias and his team:
Notable Quotes:
“Lord, just help me get one more”
- Desmond Doss
Movie recommendation: Hacksaw Ridge
“Free will is an illusion”
- Sam Harris
“Materialists are realists in a sense. They understand that materialism cannot explain the mind. Rather than abandoning materialism, they abandon the mind, which I think is a mistake.”
- Michael Egnor, MD, a Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at Stony Brook University
From Science Uprising EP1:
"The thing that we all know most directly and most certainly, that is the existence of ourselves, is ultimately incompatible with materialism. Well, my argument would be look…, any philosophical view that entails you don’t exist is a view that you really ought not to entertain."
- Jay Richards, PH.D. Philosophy
Research Assistant Professor, Busch School of Business
He also carries a M.Div. (Master of Divinity), a Th.M. (Master of Theology), and a B.A. with majors in Political Science and Religion.
Group Exercise:
Be still. Close our eyes. Stop listening. Don’t move and try not to feel. Imagine you are floating in a space – it could be a light or dark space, just any space you want to imagine. Try not to feel with your body, just focus on the space you are imagining. Focus on your mind, and what you are thinking about. Your identity. Not your body or your spirit, just your awareness of yourself and who you are, nothing else. You can think about things, but not actual things, imagined things. But in this exercise the important fact is that you are thinking, not any of the things you are thinking about.
Jeremiah 1:5 Complete Jewish Bible (CJB)
5 “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you;
before you were born, I separated you for myself.
I have appointed you to be a prophet to the nations.”
Here Jehovah is talking to Jeremiah, but let’s not get hung up on how the last part is addressed to Jeremiah as a prophet to the nations. In the New Covenant, through Christ Jesus and His great commission, *as we go into the world* WE are also bearers or ambassadors to this fallen world. We do this from the Lord’s upside down kingdom, in which our new citizenship resides.
Let’s first define solipsism as a philosophical term, then begin to look at it more practically as it applies to ourselves.
Solipsism (/ˈsɒlɪpsɪzəm/ ( listen); from Latin solus, meaning 'alone', and ipse, meaning 'self') is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist.
§6:3 The Three Circles and Leaps of Faith
Going back to solipsism and working our way out we can now more clearly see the leaps of faith that are required. While these are not equal leaps of faith, they are both assumptions that require a level of faith, and assumptions about reality that allow us to interact with what might exist. I’ve given an unequal weighting up to this point to these leaps, looking at the leap to the material world as a smaller leap and regarding the Kierkegaardian leap inward as a greater leap. But zooming out to assess the landscape, we begin at the soul, which is the mind.
We think and therefore we are. By the process of our own thought, our own existence is the only thing we can absolutely know for sure. Everything else is belief. Everything else if faith. By its nature the soul exists in a non-material part of reality we can define as the spirit world. By virtue of our spirit needing to exist somewhere, this means that the spirit world must also exist too.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, and Daniel Dennett, who try to hijack science to promote materialism—the idea that physical reality is all there is.
From Science Uprising EP1:
"The thing that we all know most directly and most certainly, that is the existence of ourselves, is ultimately incompatible with materialism. Well, my argument would be look…, any philosophical view that entails you don’t exist is a view that you really ought not to entertain."
- Jay Richards, PH.D. Philosophy
Research Assistant Professor, Busch School of Business
He also carries a M.Div. (Master of Divinity), a Th.M. (Master of Theology), and a B.A. with majors in Political Science and Religion.
Thoughts, ideas, dreams, emotions and feelings, opinions… There are many natural words to describe things that we have every day. And none of these things are physical. They are not made of material.
Some say that we delude ourselves into believing that these things exist. This is a necessary argument for the materialist.
1 Peter 1:10-14 Complete Jewish Bible (CJB)
10 The prophets, who prophesied about this gift of deliverance that was meant for you, pondered and inquired diligently about it. 11 They were trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of the Messiah in them was referring in predicting the Messiah’s sufferings and the glorious things to follow. 12 It was revealed to them that their service when they spoke about these things was not for their own benefit, but for yours. And these same things have now been proclaimed to you by those who communicated the Good News to you through the Ruach HaKodesh sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things!
13 Therefore, get your minds ready for work, keep yourselves under control, and fix your hopes fully on the gift you will receive when Yeshua the Messiah is revealed. 14 As people who obey God, do not let yourselves be shaped by the evil desires you used to have when you were still ignorant.
Important notes:
Gift of deliverance is a spiritual gift.
It is meant for us, because our Heavenly Father has given it to us.
This gift was paid for by the suffering of our Lord Jesus, our Messiah.
The Spirit of our Lord Jesus, the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit), evangelizes the Good News through us.
Our calls to action:
First: Get or minds ready for work.
If our minds are not real, this wouldn’t make any sense.
We always have work to do here, and always need to encourage ourselves and each other.
Second: Fix ourselves fully on the give we will receive when Jesus is revealed.
Fully is a lot. This requires us to work the trappings of this world out of our life.
This is a difficult process and requires the guidance of the Lord, who sees and understands.
But receiving this guidance depends on our working to deepen and widen (strengthen) or “lean in” to our relationship with Him.
As we saw in the parable of the Prodigal Son, a genuine step in the direction of Jehovah allows Him to come running to us. He desires that relationship more than we do!
Leaps of Faith
Let’s now consider the two leaps of faith.
Let’s be cautious with this. I am not saying that because our own soul exists and its need to exist somewhere non-material we will define as the spirit world, that this alone predicates the existence of the rest of the spirit world. A leap of faith is required as we assume the remainder of the spirit world. What do you know better, your own identity, or the sensory experiences you have? It must be our own identity, because our senses can be fooled. Moreover, our ability to be certain that any part of the material world we are not directly experiencing exists falls into even greater levels of assumption. But we know our soul exists.
Let’s look at a visual picture of the model of reality.
This is the leap “outward.”
For more see:
Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith.”
Bishop Berkley’s “other minds.”
We can observe our interaction between our soul and our material body. We can observe similar behavior with other bodies, and discern that these other bodies must have souls that exist as well. It is a pragmatic step, not a provable step. It is a step that requires faith that the material world and the things we experience in it are real, and that the manifestations of experiences are something we can interpret, understand, and make decisions about.
But if these other soul body pairs exist, then the other souls like ours must also exist. If this is true we can ask if other beings exist that do not have bodies in the material world. In the material world we find inanimate objects like rocks and dirt, and minerals. These are bodies or matter or material without a soul. They are not like our bodies which do have a soul. We also find bodies like animals that are animated, but are not thinking beings like humans. So we are able to establish a hierarchy. Could there be parallels in the spirit world?
In the same way that some people have sight or smell or hearing, and others do not or are impaired to some degree, there are people who have lesser and greater ability to experience and discern the spirit world. In the same way that I might try to explain to a person that has never had sight what the color blue looks like, or how light casts a gradient of shadows, I could make an attempt to explain my experiences in the spirit world. If these experiences are mine alone, what basis would I have assurance that these things are real. However, if others also have similar experiences, then it might allow me to make a pragmatic assumption regarding these kinds of assumptions.
To be fair, I am basing my assumption about the material world to observe and make an assumption that other souls of soul body pairs, or people, exist. Then I’m assuming that these other people have common experiences as I do, because when they explain their experiences about both the material and spirit worlds I can relate with common experiences of my own. Because these experiences are common in type, it gives me additional confidence that these interactions are with something that actually exists. If these things actually exist, like a bus, or a spirit being, I won’t step in front of one, and I can assume the other exists as part of reality.
This connects back to my knowledge about my own existence, how I know I exist through the process of my own thinking process, and can then relate as a part spirit being to the reality that other spirit beings exist. All of these assumptions are connected. They are interdependent. In other words, if I don’t accept the existence of the spirit world, and the existence of other spirit beings, then what can I make of my experiences in the material world? How do I explain the manifestation of activity by other people? Their thoughts, their ability to think and communicate the way my spirit does? These two parts of reality are codependent. If I pragmatically assume the one, then I must pragmatically assume the other. There is no halfway. I’m either stuck at solipsism, or I assume the whole thing.
I use to think a model of reality had my self identity in the center. From there I took what I thought was a small leap of faith to assume the material world. From there I thought I had to take a second larger leap, the Kierkegaardian leap to an outer circle. Aristotle coined this as ‘metaphysics’ or the part after ‘physics,’ which was his writing about the material world. Thus, metaphysics was after or beyond physics. But this second leap seemed fraught with problems, primarily that I didn’t think anything in the spirit world could be experienced. I knew nothing of ghosts, spirits, demons, angels, or gods. Since I couldn’t know anything about this proposed part of reality, then it didn’t matter to me whether it existed or not.
Then one day I realized that my own thinking was a function of what was my soul. If this was true, that would mean that all of the experiences I had with lucid dreams, visions, knowledge of future events, and the like might also come from another part of reality. This sent me on a series of thought experiments which I’ve outline for you. This led me to a new model of reality.
The new model still presents itself as a three concentric circle model. However, in this new model our self identity is the middle circle. The leaps between the inner and outer circles are proportional to their radius, because our knowledge of the spirit world is so closely aligned with the certainty of our own reality. While it takes a round trip to come to terms with the reality and existence of the spirit world, once assumed it begins to return results in a way that is as natural as knowing our own existence.
Size of the Leap
The leap of faith to the material world sounds like a smaller leap, because the material world feels tangible. And the leap of faith to believe in spiritual things sounds like a much greater distance – which is why it is characterized as irrational, crazy, or “out there.” But is this true?
First, the Kierkegaardian leap inward is actually a smaller leap. There is no question it is a leap of faith. But the remainder of the spirit world is more akin to our own identity than the material world. It is more alike to the things that are certain than the things that are in question.
Second, the non-Kierkegaardian leap outward to assume the material world is a larger leap. However, this is a very natural leap. The material world feels, by definition, tangible. But more than a feeling, we have little issue agreeing that this part of reality is real.
Third, that both leaps of faith are required to pragmatically explain our experiences and understand our reality. With this larger view we can experience both spirit and material, we can observe and identify things in the spirit world that do not have bodies, things in the material world that do not have souls or are inanimate, and things that have both soul and body like humans.
As a baseline it requires that both the material world and spirit world exist, are related, and interact. From this perspective it is possible to begin interpreting more about what this means for all of us.
§6:4 Why It’s Not The Few, It’s All of Us
Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Matthew 11:15, 13:9, 13:43, Mark 4:9, Luke 8:8, 14:35…
Not everyone who has ears can hear. Often times being hurt can close our ears. Lucifer uses hurt to evoke a response in us to be defensive, aggressive, respond in anger, and create additional hurt in others.
The “irrational left” or “progressive left” with it’s “social justice warriors” is doing a lot of that now. But this isn’t just on them. The conservative right, with its legalistic points of view, power and aggression has also been at fault. There is no part of this world that hasn’t been affected.
Jesus is the only one without sin. He is the only Human to not be divided from the Father, or to have “missed the mark” (definition of sin).
Romans 12:17-21 Complete Jewish Bible (CJB)
17 Repay no one evil for evil, but try to do what everyone regards as good. 18 If possible, and to the extent that it depends on you, live in peace with all people. 19 Never seek revenge, my friends; instead, leave that to God’s anger; for in the Tanakh it is written,
“Adonai says, ‘Vengeance is my responsibility; I will repay.’”
20 On the contrary,
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
For by doing this, you will heap
fiery coals [of shame] on his head.”
21 Do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good.
Most people think of the spirit world as something apart from their reality, far away, and abstract. But if you agree with my definitions and argument, then we all experience the spirit world, because we are all apart of it just as much as we are apart of the material world. We all think and dream, so we all interact with the spiritual part of ourselves.
Each of us also experiences the material world through our senses, which is something agreeable to all but the solipsist. And because we all have both spirit world and material world experiences, we all experience the interrelation between these parts of reality. If these assumptions help explain our practical experience, then it becomes important to dig deeper into an understanding of common baselines.
Concluding Premise:
1. Assumption: The reality of both the spirit and material worlds are essential to our existence.
2. Assumption: After receiving Jesus as our Messiah, we are fused to His Spirit, and our real citizenship is in the Kingdom of God (read Romans chapter 8).
3. Therefore: Our work is to develop our relationship with our Lord Jesus. (1 Peter 1:13-14)
4. Therefore: Through this connection He pours the Kingdom of Heaven into us, and through us into this world.
5. Therefore: When we pray for His Kingdom come, His Will be done, we are praying both that this come into use and be done in us SO THAT it will come into and be done in this world AS HE WORKS through us.
6. And Finally: There is no part of us or our lives that is not impacted or relevant for total repentance and alignment to the will of the Lord Jesus.
Comentários